I’ve had good luck with Jekyll, saving the source on github, and setting it up so pushing to main auto-deploys to a Cloudflare site. Using Markdown and for larger media, uploading to S3.

Much easier to set up and maintain than github pages. Since it’s static output, pretty snappy. Also includes RSS feeds and permanent URLs.

Have also set up several Wordpress sites. Slower, but if you want wysiwyg editing, user comments, or there are several contributors, would work better.

Have also heard good things about ghost, but haven’t actually deployed one yet.

You’re overpaying 😁

Cloudflare static web hosting, including TLS/SSL, DDOS protection, WAF, and AI scraper protection, are all free: https://softwareonbudget.com/blog/how-to-host-static-website-for-free-with-cloudflare-pages/

And if you connect it to github repo, it auto-updates on push to main.

No connection. Just a happy user and a fan.

Saw a posting this past week on SSD drive failures. They’re blaming a lot of it on ‘over-logging’ – too much writing trivial, unnecessary data to logs. I imagine it gets worse when realtime data like OpenTelemetry get involved.

Until I saw that, never thought there was such a thing as ‘too much logging.’ Wonder if there are any ways around it, other than putting logs on spinny disks.

Have used Jekyll, Hugo, and Docusaurus to generate static sites, and Wordpress and Ghost for blogs.

A few things to think about:

• Where do you plan to host and how much is the monthly budget?
• How much traffic do you expect to get?
• Will the content be static or updated often (i.e. landing page site vs. blog).
• Will more than one person be updating the site?
• How technical is the person/people updating the site? Are they OK with using terminal and command-lines, or GUI and point and click.
• Will there be ‘member-only’ features, i.e. things that require users creating an account and logging in?
• Will you need to offer a way for people to get in touch? Like, contact pages, email, etc.
• Will there be a need for public to post and answer questions (i.e. a forum).
• Will you need future support for things like newsletters, shopping carts, etc.

If one-person, technical, static, I’d go with Jekyll and Github pages, or Jekyll/Hugo/Docusaurus on Cloudflare pages. They all have templates. But you need to know how to setup github repos and tools. Cost is $0 to operate, other than annual fee for custom DNS domain name.

If more than one person, non-technical, or dynamic, then hosted Wordpress or Ghost. Budget for DNS name and ~20-50 dollars or euros/month (plus or minus, depending on features and traffic). There are free versions of these, but they slap ads all over them.

You can self-host all these, but it’s much easier to have someone else deal with traffic spikes.

If you need community forums or a way for users to communicate with each other, then none of the above.