Dear HN Community,<p>I am curious to know which blogging platform you use ? Is it paid or free ? Do you self-host ? What is the running costs in case you self-host and what sort of limitations are there to using a platform vs self-hosting ?<p>Thanks for your inputs!<p>Cheers!
Self hosted here.<p>I migrated from Wordpress to Middleman for my blog [0], but wanted to have a web UI for writing and editing blog posts so I wrote my own [1]. Here's a screenshot [2].<p>I also didn't want to lose all the comment history so I wrote another gem [3] for Disqus-like comments, which are loaded via AJAX given that the website is completely static.<p>I haven't gotten around documenting the gems but hope to do sometime this month!<p>[0] <a href="http://bootlog.org" rel="nofollow">http://bootlog.org</a>
[1] <a href="https://rubygems.org/gems/artifact" rel="nofollow">https://rubygems.org/gems/artifact</a>
[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/tomaspollak/status/753728789679529985" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/tomaspollak/status/753728789679529985</a>
[3] <a href="https://rubygems.org/gems/cachai" rel="nofollow">https://rubygems.org/gems/cachai</a>
For my site [0], I use a custom static site generator that I wrote myself in rust. [1] (Because you know what the world really needed more than anything else? Yeah, yet another static site generator.) It's super basic right now, but it does the job.<p>Since it's a fully static site, I have Nginx serving it directly on a $5/mo DO server, along with a bunch of other crap. Static sites are great because they need almost nothing from a server for hosting.<p>Also, the site style is heavily inspired by [2].<p>[0] <a href="https://psbarrett.com/" rel="nofollow">https://psbarrett.com/</a>
[1] <a href="https://github.com/azdle/virgil" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/azdle/virgil</a>
[2] <a href="http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/</a>
I use Jekyll (<a href="https://jekyllrb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://jekyllrb.com/</a>) which generates static html pages from templates and your blog posts written in markdown. The advantage of this is that I can put my entire blog in git. Also there is no database needed, which makes hosting much easier.<p>I generate the static html and then put them inside a docker container to deploy. The host is a bare metal server (not free but cheap) with docker installed.<p>Both of these blogs use Jekyll + Docker as described above:<p>- <a href="http://blog.nimbleci.com/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.nimbleci.com/</a><p>- <a href="http://blog.emmetogrady.com/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.emmetogrady.com/</a>
Ghost, self-hosted, the software is free and I pay $5/month for the small DO box.<p>The platforms (Wordpress.com, Ghost(Pro), Blogger, etc) will probably handle massive spikes better. With something like CloudFlare, I think you can mitigate a lot of that though.<p>I've also been happy with Tumblr in the past — there's no self-hosted version available, but hosted is free. I like Ghost's writing tools better, but Tumblr's media tools are far more full featured and battle tested from years of tons of users.
Slightly unrelated, you IMHO should always use a solution where you can use your own domain name, so you can rescue your content to your own server or another provider and keep your links alive (in case a service is shutting down, your preferences change, ...)<p>I personally run a DIY-thing, but that's not because I necessarily think that is a good idea ;) If I weren't using that I'd either use a static site generator of some kind or pay for Wordpress.com.
I use one that I wrote from scratch with Flask. I love the simplicity of both its code & UI. Recently added an admin panel so I can even edit posts while commuting. It's hosted on a 5$/month Vultr VPS. Had lot of fun trying to make it "secure".<p>In my case the big inconvenience is that I spend more time developing/improving it than actually writing articles.
If "self-hosting" means "web hosting" these days, then my blog/portfolio site [1] is on a regular web hosting ($45/year, got a few other sites there as well), and runs on the code i wrote myself (PHP, no DB).<p>It took a few years (about a decade, really) to get the design right - people's perception is a weird thing, what looks nice to me is an abomination to most, and i usually got about one piece of feedback per year.<p>That's probably the biggest argument i can give against going DIY with web design.<p>I've had a few game servers self-hosted (in the "PC-under-the-table" sense), and i would really advice to get a real hosting for such things - every time the internet is acting up or you try something that needs parts from the server box, someone would ping you on Skype about why the server is down. :/)<p>[1] <a href="http://orbides.org" rel="nofollow">http://orbides.org</a>
I use my own static site generator "minni" - <a href="https://github.com/jyotiska/minni" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jyotiska/minni</a>. The UI used to be really basic, so I tweaked it a little in last couple of days. Here is the link to the blog - <a href="https://jyotiska.github.io/blog/" rel="nofollow">https://jyotiska.github.io/blog/</a>
<a href="https://medium.com/free-stuff" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/free-stuff</a><p>I'm using Medium, it has limited features, but it's the best out there if you're just looking for something simple. Quality of posts in Medium as a community is better than MOST blogging platforms out there.
I use WordPress on a shared server at A2 Hosting. It's about ten bucks a month and it does everything I need. I recently installed wp-cli so I can make and edit posts from the command line so I can write in pure markdown without getting into knock down fights with the built in editor about formatting.
Hosted Wordpress (with WP-Engine).<p>The ecosystem (primarily the number of really nice themes) and the fact I've been using it for years just means it's the simplest option.<p>I'd probably never self-host it again for anything important, though. Too much configuration / update / tweaking / security / etc / etc time.
<a href="https://medium.com/sound-shelter/" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/sound-shelter/</a><p>+ Instant access to Medium userbase.<p>+ Solid SEO as the site is spidered so much quicker than any blog I've ever had.<p>+ Nice layout and easy to read.<p>- I don't own the content.<p>- If Medium closes, so does my blog.
I currently use Github Pages and Jekyll. I did this because it was free and dead simple. At some point I'm thinking about moving it over to Amazon S3 because its cheap, highly scalable, and a good excuse to try out Amazon S3.