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Comment by ipsento606 | Hacker News Reader

    > This stack gives me full control: no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in,
    > and no risk of platforms disappearing or changing policies.

I'm not trying to dunk on the author, but this sentiment encapsulates a tremendous paradigm shift in the meaning of "full control", compared to say:

* Writing in obsidian

* Syncing files via git

* Publishing via nginx hosted on the cheapest possible vps (with https via let's encrypt)

Running a static blog is one of the easiest scenarios to self-host, because even if you get slashdotted, nginx should be able to handle all the requests even if you're host it on a potato

It's not free, but you can get a VPS for $20-$30 a year.

This isn't the best fit for everyone, but it seems weird to talk about "full control" and "no risk of platforms disappearing" when you're relying on the free tier of two external companies

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The point is that because of the way they structured their blog it would be trivial to do exactly this if they ever needed to. There's no complicated export from a locked in application, you just move your blog files from one host to another (maybe to your own VPS).

The overhead of switching from Cloudflare to a VPS if they needed to is really not that much larger than switching from one VPS to another, so they likely figured it wasn't worth paying $30/yr to own the whole stack, as long as they architected it such that they could own the whole stack if they needed to.

Similarly, Obsidian is just a markdown editor. So you're not even relying on their free tier; you could use any other markdown editor on the planet with the same results. Or any cloud file syncing tool.

Been there, done that. Had my personal blog hosted on a machine like that. Even a little more sophisticated with nginx, virtual hosts and stuff like that. I ended up with almost the same setup as OP is presenting here: Hugo, GitHub Pages and Obsidian (or VS Code).

While I know how to maintain a server, as I worked as a SysOp for many years supervising way bigger infrastructures, I just didn't want to spend my free time also with maintaining some remote host, installing security updates, checking fail2ban and so on.

Self hosting is always more than just "instaling nginx".

>> but it seems weird to talk about "full control" and "no risk of platforms disappearing" when you're relying on the free tier of two external companies

This ignores the fact, that OP is actually storing the content on it's own devices. Sure, OP is using some cloud services to sync them around and GitHub/Cloudflare to eventually publish it to the world. But there's no real dependency. OP could always and easily (!) move to another similar setup.

You don't have so much platform risk when you're hosting a static site. It's not like spending a fortune on development time to build on AWS just to find that the platform is a liability for the company, but you're locked in to the vendor.

It has more to do with Obsidian vs Notion or OneNote or Google Keep I'm gonna guess

Do you even need https for static content?

Yes.

(For "social reasons": If you have any feedback channel on your static site, people won't stop breaking your balls until you add https.)

Easy problem to solve.

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