Ask HN: Best affordable hosted blog service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best affordable hosted blog service?

5 pointsuntog7 comments

Right now I'm using Tumblr as a personal blog, but their outage has finally inspired me to move to a paid service that's more suitable to long-form blogging. I know I could set up my own server, but I'd rather pay a small amount for a service I don't have to think about.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively cheap service that I can plug into a subdomain? For those using CloudFlare- would you recommend it as method of reducing bandwidth usage?

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I'd say use Azure Websites: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/web-sites/. You can easily select one of the many frameworks/blogs/CMSes from a list, and install it. Azure will automatically get the latest version from the official website and set it up for you.

The best part is that it's free to do this. Azure websites cost you nothing. If you need more power you can easily switch to dedicated servers, meaning that you have a lot more scalability.

Oh, and it supports a wide range of languages. Not just .NET, but also Java, Python, node.js, PHP, etc.

I used to use Squarespace but switched to WordPress with a grid server web host (http://www.simplexwebs.com/) and I'm using a heavily optimised framework called Thesis (http://jonnyrowntree.com/thesis)

I also use CloudFlare have found that it loads my website faster and has doubled my traffic on most days. I'd recommend it, even if you have a fast server.

You could try Orchard CMS on Azure websites. It is a CMS, but it has an out of the box "Blog" recipe that let's you get started without writing any code. Azure websites is cheap (and free if you use the free tier). You can deploy with git, or you can deploy with a canned Orchard CMS image already on the Azure portal if you don't want to touch any code.

Blogspot? It's dirt simple to setup, you get your own subdomain and there are millions of things to customize. I'm using it for my blog (http://bjourne.blogspot.se/) and am satisfied with it. The google+ integration and fool-proof spam detection are nice benefits.

I played around a bit with Scriptogr.am (http://scriptogr.am/), it's basically a static blog generator that runs on their server. All you have to do is add markdown files to a folder in your Dropbox.

Why not create a Jekyll blog on Github Pages? It's free and fairly simple to use (once you've set it up)...

www.squarespace.com ?

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