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> I actually pay Ghost roughly 200 euros per year > I just write them in Notion, and then I copy-paste them into the Ghost editor > every now and then I have
by bhaney 3y ago
> I actually pay Ghost roughly 200 euros per year
> I just write them in Notion, and then I copy-paste them into the Ghost editor
> every now and then I have to hack some CSS together to fix some bugs
> the theme can only be compiled with an ancient version of npm
> the code is really messy, so at some point I won’t be able to maintain it any longer
> images don’t work very well with my theme
To each their own, but to me this sounds like an absolutely terrible "website stack"
- jdsalaro 3y agoOr in my case Sphinx + Material Design + [ my magical list of 10+ extensions ] + VS Code + sphinx-autobuild + tox + GitLab Pages = magic Send help pls
- jeremyjh 3y agoWell and later they admit: > So, all in all, I’m paying almost 400 euros per year to host a personal blog. Seems...a bit much. But what do I know? I've just been using Jekyll since 2013. For a long time now Github has had first-class support for Jekyll and so I haven't even had to mess with Ruby for many years now, I usually just edit it online in the Github UI. I pay $0 a year for this service so my only cost is DNS.
- mylab6 3y agoAs someone who's manually setup Ghost blog, I'd heavily advise towards just paying for Ghost hosting. I wasted hours setting it up, and I gave up when it came time to configure emailing. Anyway, here's my blog post on it. I actually pay 20$ to AWS to host my Captain Rover server, but I have multiple web apps running. https://rhymesworldwide.com/self-hosting-this-blog/ https://rhymesworldwide.com/self-hosting-this-blog/
- haswell 3y agoAs a long time happy Ghost user, self hosting is far easier than most stacks, and I just configured a new self-hosted instance for a friend this past week (5.x). Aside from a bug with the Let’s Encrypt auto-config (I had to fix the path to the cert in the generated nginx config), it was otherwise an extremely straightforward process. I used the mailgun integration for mail, which involved adding a few lines to a config file and typing `ghost restart`. Self hosting will always involve some fiddling, but I’ve fiddled less with Ghost than almost every other thing I’ve self hosted over the decades. Maybe I’m just lucky.
- ochronus 3y agoI had the same experience. I've been self-hosting Ghost sites for years now. Cloudflare + Ghost is a really great combination, you can cache your whole site and set up a webhook to invalidate when you update/add something.
- koinedad 3y agoI had a heck of a time setting it up to self host myself and I am technically inclined. There was one thing misconfigured by default that took me a few hours to catch. Now I’m trying to figure out why the VM stops responding randomly…free sounded better to me at the time
- RobotToaster 3y agoNo wonder people still use wordpress.
- 65 3y agoI pay $0 a year to host my Next.js website on S3. I use MDX to write posts. I have CI/CD set up to auto publish when I push a new post. It's a simple set up (for a developer). I don't get why one would want to or need to pay hundreds of dollars each year to host a simple blog, especially if that person is technically inclined. There are cheaper/free options. Even your average Squarespace/Wordpress/Wix user will pay less than 400 euros a year. This sounds like the exact opposite of "perfect" to me.
- arkadiyt 3y ago> I pay $0 a year to host my Next.js website on S3. It's only free while you have no traffic. Getting a single post on the top of HN could cost you e.g. $10.
- Gigachad 3y agoI find the idea of using AWS for personal use absolutely terrifying. You are signing up for literally unlimited costs. If my site gets ddosed, I don’t want a $100,000 bill, I want the site to go offline.
- qchris 3y agoI don't think it would be too much to say something like a low-end VPS on AWS or Digital Ocean for a personal blog is too much, which would end up running somewhere between $5-10/mo depending on resources/automated backups. At 400 euros, though, they're quite a bit beyond that. I'm a bit curious what their cost per page-served ratio looks like.
- manuelmoreale 3y agoIf his stats are correct the numbers are right there. It’s roughly 100k views in around 2800 days. So that 36 views/day. If it’s 400€/year then it’s 1.10€/day to serve those 36 views so we’re looking at around .03€ per view? That seems like a lot.
- firecall 3y agoJekyll is great. Fashions with things come and go, but Jekyll is still around. Much faster now too, thanks to improvements to Jekyll and importantly Ruby! Compile times used to be painful, especially with inclusions and data files, but now I don’t have any noticeable build time pain! Cloud Cannon is a great service to run Jekyll on, but not free I don’t think.
- graypegg 3y ago+1 for Jekyll, I just recently came back to it after giving up on trying to upgrade my Gatsby 3 theme. It's a beautifully scoped project. A script that spits out HTML from templates, and some markdown. It's all you really need. I'm sure Hugo is also great for the same reason, just haven't had a chance to mess with it.
- hanniabu 3y agoI use jekyll for many sites, most aren't even blogs. But it's really slow to compile and there's not many plugin options so you have to try to write them yourself in ruby except documentation for writing your own is scarce and insufficient. I also wish there were an easier way up make an api call to get data to use within the template. I tried migrating to hugo for these reasons but i'm not a fan of hugo syntax and i couldn't figure out how to setup a non-blog site.
- poglet 3y ago> just edit it online in the Github UI I do the same but I wish there was a easier way to make a blog post as it's still a bit fiddly. It would be great if it was as simple as sending an email or writing a message in a messaging app.
- onion2k 3y agoSeems...a bit much. I'd bet that a side effect of paying that money is that you're significantly more likely to write posts. That would make it worth the money.
- INTPenis 3y agoWhy is this even on HN? It seems like a terribly confused blog post, about a terribly inefficient stack. To create any static site, including blogs, I just use hugo, maybe a custom theme, edit it in any editor, including the online one at github/gitlab, once it merges/pushes the CI/CD script is just 3 lines and 2 of those deal with aws. And of course the pricing depends on the traffic but s3 and cloudfront can handle a lot of traffic before it starts getting out of hand.
- Fethbita 3y agoHey, I do the same but using Jekyll instead of Hugo, using S3 and CloudFront, I have only been charged 0.00 so far but why do you say that the pricing would get out of hand? Isn’t CloudFront there to cache the results so that the pricing would not get out of hand? This is my blog post about how I set up my blog: https://blog.burakcankus.com/2023/04/23/getting-a-blog-running-with-jekyll-github-actions-s3-and-cloudfront.html https://blog.burakcankus.com/2023/04/23/getting-a-blog-runni...
- INTPenis 3y agoWell I'm speaking theoretically because I haven't reached that point with any of my sites. Of course you should have a budget alert in AWS first of all. But theoretically there is no such thing as a free lunch, and bandwidth costs money. Even cache hits in cloudfront generate bandwidth. A cache can't magically transfer text to your clients, it's still using transfer cost outgoing from cloudfront cache servers.
- vanjajaja1 3y agoBecause that link to ghost has a ?ref=
- diffeomorphism 3y agoIt seems that quite often the article itself is pretty irrelevant if the topic is interesting. Aka "nobody reads the article, only the headline".
- pindab0ter 3y ago
- Hoasi 3y ago> I've just been using Jekyll since 2013. For a long time now Github has had first-class support for Jekyll and so I haven't even had to mess with Ruby for many years now, I usually just edit it online in the Github UI. I pay $0 a year for this service so my only cost is DNS. Jekyll remains one of the most robust solutions for small projects and blogs.
- graypegg 3y agoYep, I agree there. So much stuff to forget. If you wanted to focus on writing, you can open up a notion document to the internet [0] if you want. Just as janky but at least there's only one idiosyncratic off-label thing to forget. [0] https://www.notion.so/help/public-pages-and-web-publishing https://www.notion.so/help/public-pages-and-web-publishing
- ano88888 3y agoWhy make life so complicated? it is a simple blog. if you don't want to host it just use wordpress. It works.
- dmje 3y agoThis. The hilarity of the HN crew when it comes to personal blogging is just endlessly behind compare. “I just boot up a new Docker instance, grunt the next.js out of my Hugo, netlify the MD files and sync my media using my homegrown jamstack media server. It only takes me 25 minutes to publish a post”. JUST USE WORDPRESS! If you genuinely find it too hard to self host (and I’m banging my head against the table cos this is HN where people apparently know what they’re doing with tech, and it’s a LAMP stack ffs), then do it on Wordpress.com. Free! Easy! Simple to migrate if you do one day want to self host! No blockers to exporting your content as XML! Or CSV! Or hit up the API! Funny old lark.
- kfrzcode 3y agoLol and I just don't host a public forum of identifiable info anymore. Why give future LLMs any more training data
- HeckFeck 3y agoPelican running on Nginx + cheap £3.50pm vps + £15 annual domain registration. Rebuild and rsync my blog any time there is a new post. Works out approx. £57 per year.
- funerr 3y agoI just migrated from Ghost because many of these problems, and lack of basic features like an integrated referral system for my newsletter.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoSeemingly the only point of this article about this dreadful process and stack is to gain referrals and make the author money. I'm not sure why its getting upvoted on HN https://ghost.org/?ref=davidgomes.com https://ghost.org/?ref=davidgomes.com https://ghost.org/referrals/ https://ghost.org/referrals/