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>You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth? Great question, I've been asked that before and here's th
by iamdave 10y ago
>You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth?
Great question, I've been asked that before and here's the closest thing I can get to what I think is a fair answer:
The work? No. It may be worth less, it may be worth more to others, to me it's definitely worth more.
But
My time, on the other hand? By publishing on Medium I'm saving a lot of time I otherwise wouldn't get back from self-hosting. Let me unpack that a bit, maybe you can provide some insight because I'd like to hear some perspectives on this I hadn't previously considered.
Keep in mind, I'm a SysAdmin during the day for a company that hosts many client sites so this is a lot of stuff I do 9-5, so I really don't want to do it after 5 if I can get out of it.
Self-hosting for me means the following:
* Spinning up a DO droplet (or Linode or whatever cloud provider you pick) and all of the ancillaries like domain, email etc
* Installing and configuring the platform (I went from WordPress to Ghost, back to WordPress)
* Making sure my installation is secure, making sure my host node is secure
* Promoting posts, keeping SEO and discoverability up-to-date, keeping my shareable URLs in check, etc.
That's a lot of work to put into self-hosting-and granted a lot of this stuff is "set it and forget it"-but when my last blog got hacked twice in a row despite checking off all the best practices for WP security-I wanted to go somewhere that allowed me to do three things and do them quickly: (1) Start a site (2) Publish posts (3) Promote them as effortlessly as possible.
Medium fit the bill brilliantly. I love their editor, I like the discoverability of other writers through the community, and it's a one-stop-shop between my site and the sports site I write for.
Big wall of text, hope that answers your question, but I'm curious what you think of this take, if you're willing?
postscript: I have recently discovered and managed to get a site up and running via Jekyll+Github pages and there's a very good chance it will become my main platform, I'm still testing out a few aspects but I'm liking what I see so far.
- discreditable 10y agoYou can avoid the bulk of the irritations you mentioned by using a static website generator and hosting content on a shared host. I host a few static websites on nearlyfreespeech.net that get maybe ~5-10k visitors per month in total. NFS.net is usage-based, and static sites are very cheap. My total bill for 2016 was 82 cents. On top of being dirt cheap, I don't need to worry about maintaining the server or platform.
- iamdave 10y agoAye, you may have commented before I edited and added the line at the bottom but I recently started running a small-site with Jekyll and Github Pages. There's an excellent change it may become my default platform.
- discreditable 10y agoI'd encourage you to look at other generators as well. Jekyll and Octopress are the big ones. I'm a little soured on Octopress at the moment because I don't like the way it manages ruby dependencies. I plan to evaluate pelican soon to see if the situation is any better. I'd also advocate using a real host instead of gh-pages because it gives you more control. In my case I like using TLS on my own domain.
- iamdave 10y agoRe: Jekyll hosting anyone you'd recommend? As far as control goes, gh-pages has met almost all of my needs as I can use proper and semantic markup, use a custom domain and such. In your opinion what am I missing out on based on my above comments that should be considered? I appreciate the feedback so far, you've raised some good points to think about.
- grzm 10y agoAWS S3 can work well.
- discreditable 10y agoI like NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Like I said previously, my hosting costs were 82 cents for 2016. I cheat a little using Cloudflare to cache content, but I estimate my bill would be maybe $2 without Cloudflare. The biggest advantage of my own host is TLS with my custom domain. Last time I checked, gh-pages doesn't do that. I'm a big proponent of encrypting the web, so that alone is enough for me. On top of TLS, using a real host gives me some control I wouldn't have on gh-pages. I can use .htaccess to redirect pages, set cache expiry times, and server headers (such as strict-transport-security). All of that makes it worth the very low cost of entry.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- djrogers 10y ago99% of that work involved in self hosting can be avoided with the same $10 paid to SquareSpace or similar hosts - and at least in the case of SS it truly is set-and-forget. About the only thing you don't get is a medium.com URL - which is probably a good thing if you're trying to get your name recognized at all...