
Ask HN: Where do you host your personal blog these days? - thakobyan
I&#x27;ve been using Medium for almost 2-3 years now to host my personal site and blog (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tigran.nyc). I&#x27;ve started to feel I want something more customizable. Any suggestions will be appreciated.
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darkstar999
Look at static blog generators (hugo, jekyll) + s3 + cloudfront. You don't pay
unless you have traffic.

~~~
naragon
Along these lines, I'm trying Github pages with Jekyll; works for me.

~~~
Zazezizozuzy
I'm going to second this, especially for a tech blog.

I sent one up in January. Despite not spending much time on it so far, there
were a couple things I've already gathered from it.

First, is basic Git functionality. Without having much experience with remote
repos, it provided me a good opportunity to try things out without being able
to break too much. I essentially write up posts locally, then push them to a
GitHub repo. Super simple.

Second is Linux and SSH. I have local repos on a Linux machine at home. I can
SSH into the machine, write up a post, then push it out. I had very little
knowledge of Linux and SSH prior. It's been pretty helpful.

The biggest thing I think it offers is convenience. I have a very simple way
of writing posts, no matter where I am. It's pushed me to learn new systems
(ones that a lot of people are already familiar with) and it allows for a
simple means of fixing things (through GitHub's interface) in case I do break
anything.

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0xCMP
Hugo + Github is killer. So is Jekyll on Github, I just prefer Hugo because
it's easier to setup locally and also allows greater theme control.

my site: [https://cmp.is](https://cmp.is) repo:
[https://github.com/0xcmp/cmpis.github.io-
hugo](https://github.com/0xcmp/cmpis.github.io-hugo)

~~~
clubm8
It's my understanding you can't deploy HTTPS on a github hosted Jeckyll site
that's using - has that changed?

(To clarify: https:github.com/shitpostingblog, but
[https://shitbpostingblog.xyz](https://shitbpostingblog.xyz) is not)

~~~
chatmasta
You can use the cloudflare free plan. The user will see https. Traffic will be
encrypted between the user and cloudflare, but not between cloudflare and
github. For a personal site that's not transmitting PII over the wire, I don't
see a problem with that.

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Nadya
Neocities. Static files, I rarely post. I pay the $5 to have a custom domain
and support the site.

Mostly because I support what Neocities wants to be and I loved the old
Geocities community. I'm not active in the Neocities community due to time but
I do my best to encourage others to join. :)

I could find alternative hosting for $2/mo that would suit my needs but don't.

The main purpose of my site is for easier sharing of things: programs I use,
anime recommendations, music recommendations, and how to contact me.

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citrusui
I'm using Jekyll + Firebase Hosting on my blog[0]. Currently looking into
switching to Hugo[1] as it doesn't require Ruby and claims to generate pages
much faster.

[0]: [https://citrusui.me/blog](https://citrusui.me/blog)

[1]: [https://gohugo.io](https://gohugo.io)

~~~
cies
I can attest, Hugo is very fast. You might want to look into
[https://www.netlifycms.org/](https://www.netlifycms.org/) (works with Hugo
among others), and [https://github.com/netlify/victor-
hugo](https://github.com/netlify/victor-hugo) if you want to use Gulp/Webpack
in your workflow.

~~~
citrusui
Thanks. Netlify's dashboard has improved a lot since I last used it (which was
a month or two ago.)

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xiaoma
This is a solved problem. Use WordPress. It's insanely customizable, has a
huge ecosystem and now runs 27% of the sites on the web.

~~~
dyladan
> How do people implement live dashboards on the web these days?

> This is a solved problem. Use Flash. It's insanely customizable, has a huge
> ecosystem and now runs x% of the sites on the web.

This is argumentum ad populum. Lots of people used Java applets or Flash just
a few short years ago, and I think we can all agree that the current
HTML5/CSS3/JS ecosystem is much better.

~~~
xiaoma
When the goal is marketing or communication it's _rational_ to use the more
popular ecosystem. The huge ecosystem gives you a huge advantage in getting
things done and there are no bonus points for being right in advance. This is
as true with blogs today as it was for flash a few years ago. Over the past
five years many companies have essentially set fire to their money making
HTML5 versions of their flash games, reinventing the wheel for multiple tools
in their setup and extend development time only to find their HTML5 versions
got worse reviews and were still buggy on some browsers.

And unlike flash vs HTML5, your choice of blogging back-end does nothing to
extend your reach. Flash sites weren't usable for iPhone users but WP
absolutely is. Not only that, but there are thousands of free themes and
plugins to optimize the experience.

The rational way to pick a platform is to evaluate them based on the
advantages they offer you now. For most sites now that's not going to be
flash. For most blogs it's going to be WP with the occasional feeder post to
Medium/LinkedIn/Facebook.

------
jcadam
I used to run wordpress on a digitalocean FreeBSD VPS (and before that I was
using some janky Ruby-on-Rails based blog engine), but I eventually grew tired
of administering my own server just for a blog.

Now, I pay $2.95/month to have wordpress.com host it. I know it's not a very
l33t solution, but the migration was easy and it works well enough. I get ~10
visitors a day, so it really doesn't matter, I suppose. It's mostly just a
dumping ground for whatever nonsense pops into my head from time to time:
([https://jamesadam.me/](https://jamesadam.me/)).

------
pzaich
I recently switched my old VPS-hosted Wordpress blog to a static site
generated by Middleman[1] hosted on Github pages[2]. It's been a really nice
way to maintain flexibility of design with a huge boost to performance and
improved development/writing workflow. I use markdown so I can even write my
articles in a markdown editor if I want to.

[1] [https://middlemanapp.com/](https://middlemanapp.com/) [2]
[http://paulzaich.com/](http://paulzaich.com/)

------
justboxing
I use a workflow that goes Hugo <==> GitHug <==> Netlify

Completely automated, blazing fast, and all 3 are FREE. Netlify even includes
basic SSL for free (!!!), and that what I've implemented on all my Netlify
hosted sites.

Here's 1 of my blogs that I maintain using this setup.
[https://www.pawpurrazi.com/](https://www.pawpurrazi.com/)

I've also made a youtube video tutorial showing you step by step how to do
this.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSwoCvd4QIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSwoCvd4QIc)

I came to this setup from previously using WordPress to host all my blogs and
then getting tired of dealing with all the security holes, performance
bottlenecks and "pharma hacks" that come with it. I did evaluate Jekyll as the
blog engine, but the lack of incremental builds was a dealbreaker for me. Hugo
has incremental builds from v 0.16 onwards, and it is also super fast, I
tested with 5000 posts, builds in a few seconds.

DISCLAIMER: I don't work for Netlify nor am affiliated with them. I find their
service to be blazing fast and their support is excellent (even for free
tiers), so I made the video a while back for everyone else to use. The co-
founders Matt Biilmann and Chris Bach are both super smart and answer
questions promptly, Matt also appears to have deep technical knowledge when it
comes to caching, security, performance etc.

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jff
Wrote my own thing on top of Go's http package. It handles subdomains to a
limited extent and will also serve Markdown-formatted blog entries. I run it
on a RAM Host KVM-based VPS, which I also use as a shell box and a traffic-
forwarding endpoint when I'm on untrusted networks. The RAM Host VPS is a
little expensive but after some incredibly frustrating experiences with the
idiots at ChicagoVPS, the lack of drama has been well worth it.

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SloughFeg
I host Ghost on a digital ocean VM. $5 a month isn't too bad hosting anything.

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rwieruch
Hugo + Digital Ocean [0]. I find it a powerful low cost combination with a lot
of flexibility.

\- [0] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-
days/](https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/)

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Sir_Cmpwn
GitHub pages, and I use nginx to add SSL and proxy to it through one of my
servers.

~~~
dyladan
This is a nice solution but if you have any readers that don't live near you,
you may want to think about using Cloudflare for SSL termination. SSL can add
unacceptably high latency to connection costs for people who are not in close
proximity to your host. A typical HTTPS handshake using TLS requires 4 round
trips assuming no packet loss. The Cloudflare CDN does a great job of making
sure this penalty is reduced as much as possible by having edge nodes as close
to as many users as possible. Just something to think about.

edit: You may even want to think about using something like netlify. The free
tier is easily generous for all but the most popular personal blogs and if you
outgrow it you probably will be able to make enough revenue to pay for better
hosting anyways.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Absolutely not. CloudFlare is a cancer on the net. I won't trade security for
centralization and marginal speed improvements, my blog is pretty slim anyway.

------
gshakir
Jekyll + S3 bucket's static website + Cloudfront

S3 bucket static website is great. I have also hosted React apps with full
routing by setting 'error' page to 'index.html' on the S3 bucket properties.

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fgandiya
Right now, I'm using WordPress.com since it's pretty simple to use and the
editor works really well.

I'm looking into a better way to host a blog, but it will be a while until I
do.

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discreditable
I use Octopress and host content on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I like it over gh-
pages because I can run TLS on the root domain and can tweak server headers
via .htaccess. On top of that, static hosting at NFS is extremely cheap. 2016
cost me 82 cents. I get maybe 5k visitors/month and use 300mb/month. I cheat
on bandwidth by caching at Cloudflare heavily. Without CF my bandwidth would
be double (but still pretty cheap!).

------
geuis
Nothing special, just a wordpress self-install hosted on linode. I don't blog
much, and haven't had a need to use anything more modern.

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maxdeviant
My site is written in React + Next.js
([https://github.com/zeit/next.js/](https://github.com/zeit/next.js/)) and
hosted on now ([https://zeit.co/now](https://zeit.co/now)).

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Doctor_Fegg
On a Hetzner box I have a bunch of other sites on. The code is about 30 lines
of Ruby using an existing Postgres/Datamapper-based framework. No need for
indexing or search (Google does that), comments (no thanks), just the
trivialest of CRUD.

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dyladan
Netlify with a GitHub post-update hook to automatically build and deploy when
I push. No muss no fuss with free SSL termination provided by letsencrypt and
low latency handshakes across the globe. Now if only I had something to
write...

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moose333
Jekyll and Gitlab Pages: [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/07/gitlab-pages-
setup/](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/07/gitlab-pages-setup/)

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dadelantado
OpenShift + Spress [https://www.openshift.com/](https://www.openshift.com/) It
uses Github workflow

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calebm
I use Pelican (static generator) and host on Digital Ocean
(calebmadrigal.com).

~~~
dokument
Pelican is great. I have it installed on a local vm which I use for composing
then I push the static files to the webserver (ramnode). (www.adammelton.com)

~~~
NotQuantum
I'm also a big ran of ramnode and pelican. I've had a host there for the past
4 years

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pranitbauva1997
I mostly write the technical blogs on my website[1] with jekyll and my medium
account for just random thoughts.

[1]: [http://www.bauva.com](http://www.bauva.com)

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charlieegan3
I have recently enjoyed using the Standard App Engine to host my personal
site. I have wercker run the middleman build and then the gcloud app deploy.
Works well for me.

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patmcguire
Hostgator, I starting using it a bazillion years ago and it hasn't broken yet.
I'm almost certainly hackable, but it works.

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transistor-man
I've been using budgetvm's openvz VPS's for 2 yrs. Fairly happy, plenty of
options for space if you need it.

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brettcannon
Ghost(Pro). Support has been fantastic with responses to emails measured in
hours, not days (even on weekends!).

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alexgaribay
I've use Ghost on Digital Ocean for a few years now. $5/month is pretty cheap.
No issues so far.

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kidlogic
Linkedin because most of my postings are aimed at increasing my professional
development/reputation

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praveenster
Blogger. I am planning to migrate it to Pelican (getpelican.com) on
DigitalOcean soon.

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sharmi
python based Static site generator Nikola hosted on digitalocean along with a
few other sites.

The advantage over pelican:

1\. python notebook (Jupyter) is a first class citizen

2\. I can set custom urls for each post. same as the previous blog system from
which I am migrating

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nunez
On Wordpress but am slowly in the process of moving to a hugo/s3 pipeline

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decasteve
Jekyll --> Ubuntu + nginx on OVH (Canada) VPS.

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steveklabnik
Svbtle. Ghost is nice. GitHub Pages is fine.

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thehar
AWS RI t1.small $15/mo/year.

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bbcbasic
GitHub and CloudFlare for the padlock.

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ellisv
Hugo + GitHub pages + AWS Route 53

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thakobyan
Thanks so much everyone!

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cyanbane
Jekyll on Github.

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bockra
pastebin as before.

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pgbovine
webfaction is great

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itake
jekyll on surge.sh

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Zelmor
Chances are, nobody cares and nobody finds your site in the first place. Just
keep a desktop zimwiki or a diary. I recommend using fountain pens, they are
lovely tools to write with.

People read successful people's blogs, not yours nor mine (had one 15 years
ago, no one read that either). So stop wasting time on tweaking the front
porch and work on the piping instead.

~~~
sakawa
Why so pessimistic? Maybe when writing a blog you won't get more than a
handful regular readers, but keeping it public stimulates you to talk about
you, your job, and the solutions you got when encountered a problem (sure, you
won't talk about how much you love your dog, I hope).

I'd also say that a well kept blog may be more important than a CV since you
can actually tell how good you are in your job.

To answer the question: I used to blog with pelican, and now hugo.

~~~
Zelmor
I guess it came through like that unintentionally. I had a bad time dealing
with procrastination back then, where I was writing up snippets and thoughts
on a blog instead of working on projects that really pushed me forward in
life. Tweaking html and whatnot.

I feel that most people crave attention more than they crave growing in
whatever they are writing about. Maybe it all boils down to how I felt back
then. These days, I read much more and write very little. It fits me at the
moment, and I am better for not craving others attention and approval.

Oh well, I'll stick to fountain pens for now. :)

