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To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site. There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popul

To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site. There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've seen. Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site generator's language into account. Do you like... Ruby? -> Jekyll[1] Go? -> Hugo[2] JavaScript? -> Gatsby[3] or Eleventy[4] Some other language? -> google "[language] static site generator" and see how many GitHub stars it has. Once you've figured that out, most of the hosts support custom domains. Netlify[5] is free, and works very well. It's what I use currently. I used to host my site on DigitalOcean[6], but Netlify is definitely more painless, especially from a devops/patching standpoint. Plus it has a CDN so your site would be faster. [0] https://daveceddia.com/ https://daveceddia.com/ [1] https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/ [2] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ [3] https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ [4] https://www.11ty.io/ https://www.11ty.io/ [5] https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/ [6] https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/

nyolfen 7y ago
big props to hugo for using a static binary without some insane dependency chain, i'm really pleased with it. hosting my blog on a $15/y vps with a vanity domain and hugo was one of my first projects to learn to manage a server, and i gave up with jekyll after way too much struggling with ruby. that said i'm not sure how it fares wrt to plugins, i think it's pretty vanilla in terms of user-facing features (though plenty of very straightforward theme tweaking is possible).
- OJFord 7y ago
  I was balking at $15 (for a static site) until I re-read and got /y right. Who offers that?
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    i use ramnode but you should check out lowendbox, they aggregate cheap vps services and deals
    - hitsurume 7y ago
      Specifically I believe you are referring to tinykvm , their 256mb ram tiny vps. I used them when I made my wedding website in flask and was very pleased with their service. Not affiliated with them at all and was a happy customer.
    - bishalb 7y ago
      I am wary of the very cheap VPSs. I have seen many complaints about lack of customer support, long downtimes and poor performance for these ultra cheap VPSs on lowendbox. Vultr is generally my goto.
bishalb 7y ago
Static blogs are ok until it's a smallish blog with not much content or many visitors. But can't recommend it for a serious blog proect. One would have to jump through the hoops and use hacks for even the basic things like commenting, searching etc. And forget about slightly advanced stuff like popular posts, related posts etc without some Hugo or Jekyll hacking. WordPress has the lowest barrier to entry as most shared hosts offer one click installs, is the most feature rich blogging platform and even for a complete noob, it is much easier to get started and even customize their blog to a great extent with plugins. I would also like to add that virus affecting WordPress is much of a myth now, WordPress has improved greatly in the recent years and if you just stick with the basic install and just install the reputable plugins, you should be fine. The hacking cases related to WordPress are very few and far between.
- michaelanckaert 7y ago
  I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things. Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN. Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search engine. Blogging software may have decent search by why recreate a search engine when duckduckgo.com will far exceed capabilities with site: and filetype:? For me a personal site and blog are mostly single visit kind of stops. I end up on a blog via a link but almost never do I feel the need to read the top 5 best posts of some blog. I got some interesting information from the current article but then I’m of to the next link that shows up in my feed. In my opinion a website needs readability[0] and an ATOM/RSS feed. All the rest is part ego ("my content is so great people just have to see what else I wrote") and part feature creep. [0] https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-webdesign.html https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-web...
  - tehlike 7y ago
    Except if you are ayende.com/blog
  - bishalb 7y ago
0xbadcafebee 7y ago
Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system? None of them do anything novel, or particularly better than all the others. They just have some quirk that makes people choose them. "This one is a static binary!" "This one uses a specific programming language!" "This one uses a unique templating language!" Would having a dedicated, generic standard for templating even be possible? Something with extra standards for specific uses, so you could just learn the extensions that are useful for your particular application? Maybe that would eliminate the need for 1,000 identical-but-incompatible solutions. After a while, what you actually want is a CMS, but the good ones usually are not free.
- jjjbokma 7y ago
  > Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system? In my case [0] because I wanted to generate the site from a single Markdown file. I wrote a Perl program to accomplish this. Then I got bored and wrote a Python version as well. And it works, I have kept up posting to my blog [1] for 150+ days since it went live. [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog [1] http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/
  - OJFord 7y ago
    > In my case [0] because I wanted to generate the site from a single Markdown file. Did you consider pandoc?
j88439h84 7y ago
SSGs are great. In Python I like Nikola. https://getnikola.com/ https://getnikola.com/
- tokyokawasemi 7y ago
  Pelican is also cool: https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/
dhruvkar 7y ago
We use Netlify and Hugo for our company site, which also shows our 'real-time' inventory. In reality, I have a python script that grabs our inventory from our internal ERP system, generates a hugo site and redeploys to Netlify every 20 minutes. It's been running like a charm for ~1 year.

nyolfen 7y ago

big props to hugo for using a static binary without some insane dependency chain, i'm really pleased with it. hosting my blog on a $15/y vps with a vanity domain and hugo was one of my first projects to learn to manage a server, and i gave up with jekyll after way too much struggling with ruby. that said i'm not sure how it fares wrt to plugins, i think it's pretty vanilla in terms of user-facing features (though plenty of very straightforward theme tweaking is possible).

OJFord 7y ago
I was balking at $15 (for a static site) until I re-read and got /y right. Who offers that?
- nyolfen 7y ago
  i use ramnode but you should check out lowendbox, they aggregate cheap vps services and deals
  - hitsurume 7y ago
    Specifically I believe you are referring to tinykvm , their 256mb ram tiny vps. I used them when I made my wedding website in flask and was very pleased with their service. Not affiliated with them at all and was a happy customer.
  - bishalb 7y ago
    I am wary of the very cheap VPSs. I have seen many complaints about lack of customer support, long downtimes and poor performance for these ultra cheap VPSs on lowendbox. Vultr is generally my goto.

bishalb 7y ago

Static blogs are ok until it's a smallish blog with not much content or many visitors. But can't recommend it for a serious blog proect. One would have to jump through the hoops and use hacks for even the basic things like commenting, searching etc. And forget about slightly advanced stuff like popular posts, related posts etc without some Hugo or Jekyll hacking. WordPress has the lowest barrier to entry as most shared hosts offer one click installs, is the most feature rich blogging platform and even for a complete noob, it is much easier to get started and even customize their blog to a great extent with plugins. I would also like to add that virus affecting WordPress is much of a myth now, WordPress has improved greatly in the recent years and if you just stick with the basic install and just install the reputable plugins, you should be fine. The hacking cases related to WordPress are very few and far between.

michaelanckaert 7y ago
I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things. Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN. Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search engine. Blogging software may have decent search by why recreate a search engine when duckduckgo.com will far exceed capabilities with site: and filetype:? For me a personal site and blog are mostly single visit kind of stops. I end up on a blog via a link but almost never do I feel the need to read the top 5 best posts of some blog. I got some interesting information from the current article but then I’m of to the next link that shows up in my feed. In my opinion a website needs readability[0] and an ATOM/RSS feed. All the rest is part ego ("my content is so great people just have to see what else I wrote") and part feature creep. [0] https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-webdesign.html https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-web...
- tehlike 7y ago
  Except if you are ayende.com/blog
- bishalb 7y ago

0xbadcafebee 7y ago

Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system? None of them do anything novel, or particularly better than all the others. They just have some quirk that makes people choose them. "This one is a static binary!" "This one uses a specific programming language!" "This one uses a unique templating language!" Would having a dedicated, generic standard for templating even be possible? Something with extra standards for specific uses, so you could just learn the extensions that are useful for your particular application? Maybe that would eliminate the need for 1,000 identical-but-incompatible solutions. After a while, what you actually want is a CMS, but the good ones usually are not free.

jjjbokma 7y ago
> Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system? In my case [0] because I wanted to generate the site from a single Markdown file. I wrote a Perl program to accomplish this. Then I got bored and wrote a Python version as well. And it works, I have kept up posting to my blog [1] for 150+ days since it went live. [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog [1] http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/
- OJFord 7y ago
  > In my case [0] because I wanted to generate the site from a single Markdown file. Did you consider pandoc?

j88439h84 7y ago

SSGs are great. In Python I like Nikola. https://getnikola.com/ https://getnikola.com/

tokyokawasemi 7y ago
Pelican is also cool: https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/

dhruvkar 7y ago

We use Netlify and Hugo for our company site, which also shows our 'real-time' inventory. In reality, I have a python script that grabs our inventory from our internal ERP system, generates a hugo site and redeploys to Netlify every 20 minutes. It's been running like a charm for ~1 year.