> In today’s age of data collection and privacy concerns, I prefer to pay for my blogging platform or hosting.
Not sure if that is necessary. Tons of great static blog generators these days, like Jekyll and stuff. I personally use my own vibe-coded markdown-based one [1]
You're right on the generation side, but that doesn't really address the hosting cost. If you pay for your own domain you can probably get the rest for free or < $1/month though.
If you use Fastmail for mail you may also be able to use them for a static blog. The file hosting that is included with a Fastmail account supports serving folders on the web.
Basically you can pick a folder in your file sharing area, map it to your domain or a subdomain of your domain, add an A record at your DNS pointing that to an IP Fastmail provides, and select whether you want it published as a website, a photo gallery, or a redirect to somewhere else.
If you are using your own domain for the website and accept the default of HTTPS Fastmail will deal with getting and deploying a certificate (from Let's Encrypt, I believe).
(BTW, you don't have to have your own domain for this. If you aren't use a custom domain with Fastmail apparently you can still publish static websites from your file hosting space. It will just be on one of the subdomains).
Fastmail accounts also include DNS hosting. If you use them for your DNS then all of this can be managed from the settings in the Fastmail client, which is convenient.
If you write a blog with a static site generator (which I highly suggest! Can't hack HTML!), I heartily recommend https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net for hosting. It really is nearly free, price wise, and their policies are like someone scanned my brain for "what do you most wish your vendor would do in all circumstances?".
Highly second the recommendation for nearlyfreespeech.net. In fact, even if your page is not statically generated, it's still an extremely competitive, pay-for-what-you-use service. Love it!
There are many approaches to this, but it costs me roughly $25 a year to renew my .com domain and pay for my $1 a month vps. Im using an open source cms and pay nothing for fonts because I don't monetize my blog (thus can use any of the non-commercial liscensed fonts).
I could use a more robust platform or a vps host which claims better uptime, or even find a cheaper tld for my domaim, but this works fine for me.
Substack is trying to become a new social media platform in the style of Twitter with its Notes feature, and with a mobile app with an awful feed (it's the only way to Pangram-check posts, which is unfortunately often needed). I'm using it now for my writing, reluctantly, because there are some interesting people there and it's possible to leave (it is still an email newsletter tool at heart and you have the addresses). But there's also a lot of verbose nonsense, echo chambers, and outright automated grift out there.
The paid side of it is just in poor taste. Almost inevitably, it leads you down the path to "read the bombshell beyond the paywall, now just $49.99 a year!" sensationalism.
P.S. The feed is awful in the sense of awfully effective at attention-grabbing. I managed to never install any of the standard infinite-scroll feeds (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.), but Substack sneaked up on me and man, this stuff is not good for your psyche!
I hate substack. I'll hold my nose and click a substack link if I expect it to be especially informative, but I mostly pass them over.
Added: it's not really the distasteful stuff that substack users sometimes publish on the platform (I'm not big on guilt by association in that regard). I hate the substack software and the expectation that anything on their domain will be somebody's brain fart behind a paywall.
I have some personal static web pages, no blog per se, but some bloggers use Lemmy to federate comments. That seems like a reasonable approach for static blogs if the content isn't too edgy. If you're worried about long term archiving of the comments, you can always archive them yourself with an automated client behind the scenes.
namecrane.com is a good host for shared web hosting if you don't want to use a VPS and run a HTTPD yourself. It starts at $8 per year (bring your own domain). They support tons of existing blogging engines among other things. It's a spin-off from buyvm.net which some of you might be familiar with.
Blog from your own domain and you can establish your own personal aesthetic. Blog at Substack and some people will inevitably associate you, accurately or not, with the site's established culture. Substack is notorious for its hustlers and grifters.
- Get domain ($20/year)
- Get a cheap compute instance (free or $5/month)
- Tell claude to install nginx and otherwise setup instance
- Tell claude to set DNS(s) to this instance, and modify nginx.conf
- Tell claude to setup a Hugo static site local on your computer
- Add a post in markdown, or tell claude to make one for you
- Tell claude to setup Hugo to make a template that's unique to you
- Tell claude to make shell script to build Hugo and rsync to remote host
If you stick to static pages, you can host many domains with Hacker News traffic and the compute instance won't break a sweat. https://www.orner.com/projects/
I did something similar. I had Claude fork an anonymous image board, add features to it, fix bugs in it, optimize it, add the ability to import (convert) simple HTML to the boards markup language and then I moved most of my blog posts to it. To keep it challenging the board permits many file types.
The cost for my setup is a little bit more as I wanted it to be able to handle some abuse without the need for a CDN but I think most people would just put such a thing behind Cloudflare on their free tier. It's still significantly less expensive than off-roading.
It's not exactly a traditional blog, nor is it a traditional image board. Replies may not get through real time but if they are thought out and do not break US laws or the site guidelines then it is likely they will end up on the site which I think is still a little better than some static blogs which I used to have. It's not for everyone. Well, its probably not for anyone other than me. My emphasis to Claude and Grok was to ensure it does not require JavaScript and makes a best effort to be WCAG compliant and respect peoples motion sensitivity preferences even if I never hire someone to certify it. I don't even know if HN has anyone that benefits from a WCAG compliant site.
Residential Proxies, VPN's and Tor can post but will likely end up in a moderator review queue as in my opinion all image boards should have instead of java-script puzzles or PoW, captchas, crosswalks and traffic lights as well as playing OMG hurry whack-a-mole, fighting raids, leaks, etc... Obvious crawlers get nullified.
Note that it's possible to use Git to publish to any server, it doesn't have to be Github. I use it on my blog that's just a shared account on asmallorange.
If your static site generator (I use Nikola) has a config for publishing to Github it will probably work with any remote origin.
So, this post went up several points, had several people respond, then sunk back down to one point. People downvoted it, because it explained how to host something yourself? I don’t understand downvotes.
Oracle use to offer a free compute instance in their cloud offerings. Still does, but people fight when they become available, and will write scripts to watch for them. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Digital Ocean has cheap servers too. AWS is always there, but costs more. You don't need much.
I mean if you switch to pay as you go you can get an Ampere server for free, with no wait. The wait is just for the always free tier. It's a $100 hold, but oracle's never charged me a dime. It is an insane deal, I'll never understand giving away 200gb of disk, 24gb or ram, and 4vcpus for free
I lowered my RAM allocation on my Oracle Ampere server and it runs my Hermes Agent just fine. But yes, to get the free ampere server I had to put in a credit card for possible billing. But I've never been billed.
I'm still thoroughly happy with going for a static site for 10ish years - first raw HTML, then Jekyll, now Hugo
But in the last few years I've been paying for bandwidth on my site - largely due to consistent traffic usage, as well as some big spikes, and lots of scraping! - so I'm currently hitting ~$30/mo on AWS due to needing AWS WAF on top of Cloudfront + S3
(I'd ended up needing to pay much more /mo for Netlify, bandwidth wise, so migrated to AWS)
I don’t see the point in paying for my own domain. I hate it that sources of great information disappear when the owner passes away. Chances are that GitHub pages will exist longer than I do. But if not, I can still move my business somewhere else.
Publish your writing to a domain you control, then syndicate it to several other places. If you're less than, say, 40, there's a very good chance that you will outlive Github Pages, in the same way that many of us outlived Geocities and Angelfire.
I feel like this is the author's cost when it comes to personal blogging, especially when mentioning paid typefaces.
The only thing I'd say anyone needs for blogging specifically is a domain name, but that's more to do with the nature of blogging where the author "owns" the space where the writing lives. When it comes to that there are enough free services that can provide you with the space and subdomain.
There's a weird phenomenon I've been noticing in the last two years-ish where a lot of people have become obsessed with blogging and sharing their thoughts online in their own personal digital space. I've even seen old personal blogs gain a surge of activity in the last year whereas in the years prior there would be at most a post per year.
Also regarding the point about text editors I've never understood why people use dedicated markdown editors? I thought the whole point of Markdown was minimal formatting that's hassle-free to write in whichever text box you happen to find yourself in making dedicated software kinda redundant, no? As opposed to something like Org where you rely on org-mode in Emacs otherwise GOOD LUCK when editing it "by hand".
I apologize if this comes off as a rant, I've actually enjoyed this particular post!
> When people buy a domain for their blog, it’s a clear sign they intend to stick around.
If you go through comments on some popular post from the golden age of blogging (~2011?), where people's names would link to their sites, the free wordpress.com or whatever blogspot blogs are up much more often than the custom domain ones.
Funnily enough, often the last post on the free blog will be the announcement of switching to a domain, now inactive.
I pay $0 each for my websites beyond the domain names. Cloudflare CDN + GitHub pages. For my newer sites I don't even bother with a static site generator, LLMs make writing straight HTML/CSS/a little vanilla javascript super easy. If you use webp/jpegxl for images your bandwidth costs are so low and cacheable you easily fit into free tiers.
> In today’s age of data collection and privacy concerns, I prefer to pay for my blogging platform or hosting.
Not sure if that is necessary. Tons of great static blog generators these days, like Jekyll and stuff. I personally use my own vibe-coded markdown-based one [1]
[1] https://github.com/dllu/dllup-rs
You're right on the generation side, but that doesn't really address the hosting cost. If you pay for your own domain you can probably get the rest for free or < $1/month though.
If you use Fastmail for mail you may also be able to use them for a static blog. The file hosting that is included with a Fastmail account supports serving folders on the web.
Basically you can pick a folder in your file sharing area, map it to your domain or a subdomain of your domain, add an A record at your DNS pointing that to an IP Fastmail provides, and select whether you want it published as a website, a photo gallery, or a redirect to somewhere else.
If you are using your own domain for the website and accept the default of HTTPS Fastmail will deal with getting and deploying a certificate (from Let's Encrypt, I believe).
(BTW, you don't have to have your own domain for this. If you aren't use a custom domain with Fastmail apparently you can still publish static websites from your file hosting space. It will just be on one of the subdomains).
Fastmail accounts also include DNS hosting. If you use them for your DNS then all of this can be managed from the settings in the Fastmail client, which is convenient.
Cloudflare pages have absurdly generous free tiers and absurdly cheap if you exceed that.
I’m hosted on Github Pages, which is essentially free. The domain is the most expensive bit.
Netlify is also free (but limited to only 1 domain I believe?)
If you write a blog with a static site generator (which I highly suggest! Can't hack HTML!), I heartily recommend https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net for hosting. It really is nearly free, price wise, and their policies are like someone scanned my brain for "what do you most wish your vendor would do in all circumstances?".
Highly second the recommendation for nearlyfreespeech.net. In fact, even if your page is not statically generated, it's still an extremely competitive, pay-for-what-you-use service. Love it!
There are many approaches to this, but it costs me roughly $25 a year to renew my .com domain and pay for my $1 a month vps. Im using an open source cms and pay nothing for fonts because I don't monetize my blog (thus can use any of the non-commercial liscensed fonts).
I could use a more robust platform or a vps host which claims better uptime, or even find a cheaper tld for my domaim, but this works fine for me.
> but it costs me roughly $25
This is your biggest cost. You can cut that down to $11.17 if you switch to Cloudflare.
I prefer to support smaller registrar, and a $1.83 a year savings isn't really selling it.
The real cost is the hours spent staring at something I just wrote and hating how poorly it is written.
Let me tell you a secret, from having blogged off and on since 2003: nobody gives a damn.
If you want to write, just write.
I've been using Substack to reach the platform public. Anyone have a strong opinion on this? Does that make sense?
Substack is trying to become a new social media platform in the style of Twitter with its Notes feature, and with a mobile app with an awful feed (it's the only way to Pangram-check posts, which is unfortunately often needed). I'm using it now for my writing, reluctantly, because there are some interesting people there and it's possible to leave (it is still an email newsletter tool at heart and you have the addresses). But there's also a lot of verbose nonsense, echo chambers, and outright automated grift out there.
The paid side of it is just in poor taste. Almost inevitably, it leads you down the path to "read the bombshell beyond the paywall, now just $49.99 a year!" sensationalism.
P.S. The feed is awful in the sense of awfully effective at attention-grabbing. I managed to never install any of the standard infinite-scroll feeds (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.), but Substack sneaked up on me and man, this stuff is not good for your psyche!
The feed is terrible, my feed is only att seeking pseudo art stuff
I hate substack. I'll hold my nose and click a substack link if I expect it to be especially informative, but I mostly pass them over.
Added: it's not really the distasteful stuff that substack users sometimes publish on the platform (I'm not big on guilt by association in that regard). I hate the substack software and the expectation that anything on their domain will be somebody's brain fart behind a paywall.
I have some personal static web pages, no blog per se, but some bloggers use Lemmy to federate comments. That seems like a reasonable approach for static blogs if the content isn't too edgy. If you're worried about long term archiving of the comments, you can always archive them yourself with an automated client behind the scenes.
namecrane.com is a good host for shared web hosting if you don't want to use a VPS and run a HTTPD yourself. It starts at $8 per year (bring your own domain). They support tons of existing blogging engines among other things. It's a spin-off from buyvm.net which some of you might be familiar with.
Blog from your own domain and you can establish your own personal aesthetic. Blog at Substack and some people will inevitably associate you, accurately or not, with the site's established culture. Substack is notorious for its hustlers and grifters.
Type 'substack nazi problem' into your favorite search engine.
Specifically due to one of their content rules, type 'substack nazi problem rule 34'.
Pay for the domain, yes.
The rest is optional, with good free choices up and down the stack - we're blessed with almost infinite options, paid and free.
It's not easy to have your own little corner online - but it's not hard either. And it doesn't have to cost.
For discovery I really love Bubbles (https://bubbles.town) & they even have RSS feeds.
I did something similar. I had Claude fork an anonymous image board, add features to it, fix bugs in it, optimize it, add the ability to import (convert) simple HTML to the boards markup language and then I moved most of my blog posts to it. To keep it challenging the board permits many file types.
The cost for my setup is a little bit more as I wanted it to be able to handle some abuse without the need for a CDN but I think most people would just put such a thing behind Cloudflare on their free tier. It's still significantly less expensive than off-roading.
It's not exactly a traditional blog, nor is it a traditional image board. Replies may not get through real time but if they are thought out and do not break US laws or the site guidelines then it is likely they will end up on the site which I think is still a little better than some static blogs which I used to have. It's not for everyone. Well, its probably not for anyone other than me. My emphasis to Claude and Grok was to ensure it does not require JavaScript and makes a best effort to be WCAG compliant and respect peoples motion sensitivity preferences even if I never hire someone to certify it. I don't even know if HN has anyone that benefits from a WCAG compliant site.
Residential Proxies, VPN's and Tor can post but will likely end up in a moderator review queue as in my opinion all image boards should have instead of java-script puzzles or PoW, captchas, crosswalks and traffic lights as well as playing OMG hurry whack-a-mole, fighting raids, leaks, etc... Obvious crawlers get nullified.
I would also recommend hosting your blog content on GitHub and deploy using GitHub Actions. They’re free for open source projects.
And simply use Cloudflare generous free tier to host your website and protect it from ddos.
Note that it's possible to use Git to publish to any server, it doesn't have to be Github. I use it on my blog that's just a shared account on asmallorange.
If your static site generator (I use Nikola) has a config for publishing to Github it will probably work with any remote origin.
Ignore everything after your second point, you don't need Claude or any LLM for any of this.
So, this post went up several points, had several people respond, then sunk back down to one point. People downvoted it, because it explained how to host something yourself? I don’t understand downvotes.
People downvote stuff they disagree with, not “stuff that objectively is wrong”.
Soon you’ll “Tell claude” to write your posts
You wanted to make a humoristic slippery slope effect, but I'm afraid they pulled the rug out from under you and actually suggested just that.
I was waiting for that punchline.
where do you get free compute? (serious)
Oracle use to offer a free compute instance in their cloud offerings. Still does, but people fight when they become available, and will write scripts to watch for them. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Digital Ocean has cheap servers too. AWS is always there, but costs more. You don't need much.
I mean if you switch to pay as you go you can get an Ampere server for free, with no wait. The wait is just for the always free tier. It's a $100 hold, but oracle's never charged me a dime. It is an insane deal, I'll never understand giving away 200gb of disk, 24gb or ram, and 4vcpus for free
They lowered the ram allowance. You might be paying for that now if you have the full 24gb provisioned
I lowered my RAM allocation on my Oracle Ampere server and it runs my Hermes Agent just fine. But yes, to get the free ampere server I had to put in a credit card for possible billing. But I've never been billed.
I'm still thoroughly happy with going for a static site for 10ish years - first raw HTML, then Jekyll, now Hugo
But in the last few years I've been paying for bandwidth on my site - largely due to consistent traffic usage, as well as some big spikes, and lots of scraping! - so I'm currently hitting ~$30/mo on AWS due to needing AWS WAF on top of Cloudfront + S3
(I'd ended up needing to pay much more /mo for Netlify, bandwidth wise, so migrated to AWS)
* <my name>.github.io
* markdown files
* push to GitHub
* their Jekyll actions take care of the rest
I don’t see the point in paying for my own domain. I hate it that sources of great information disappear when the owner passes away. Chances are that GitHub pages will exist longer than I do. But if not, I can still move my business somewhere else.
It's like owning your own home or renting.
There might be a good analogy out there, but this one is not it.
Publish your writing to a domain you control, then syndicate it to several other places. If you're less than, say, 40, there's a very good chance that you will outlive Github Pages, in the same way that many of us outlived Geocities and Angelfire.
I feel like this is the author's cost when it comes to personal blogging, especially when mentioning paid typefaces.
The only thing I'd say anyone needs for blogging specifically is a domain name, but that's more to do with the nature of blogging where the author "owns" the space where the writing lives. When it comes to that there are enough free services that can provide you with the space and subdomain.
There's a weird phenomenon I've been noticing in the last two years-ish where a lot of people have become obsessed with blogging and sharing their thoughts online in their own personal digital space. I've even seen old personal blogs gain a surge of activity in the last year whereas in the years prior there would be at most a post per year.
Also regarding the point about text editors I've never understood why people use dedicated markdown editors? I thought the whole point of Markdown was minimal formatting that's hassle-free to write in whichever text box you happen to find yourself in making dedicated software kinda redundant, no? As opposed to something like Org where you rely on org-mode in Emacs otherwise GOOD LUCK when editing it "by hand".
I apologize if this comes off as a rant, I've actually enjoyed this particular post!
> When people buy a domain for their blog, it’s a clear sign they intend to stick around.
If you go through comments on some popular post from the golden age of blogging (~2011?), where people's names would link to their sites, the free wordpress.com or whatever blogspot blogs are up much more often than the custom domain ones.
Funnily enough, often the last post on the free blog will be the announcement of switching to a domain, now inactive.
I pay $0 each for my websites beyond the domain names. Cloudflare CDN + GitHub pages. For my newer sites I don't even bother with a static site generator, LLMs make writing straight HTML/CSS/a little vanilla javascript super easy. If you use webp/jpegxl for images your bandwidth costs are so low and cacheable you easily fit into free tiers.
The only thing I paid for for my blog is domain, I use built it up myself, and I write with obsidian.
I handover the markdown to my coding agent when I am done. And everything is ready.
What’s a blog? Is that like a CD?
Publii + Github pages works quite well for writing/CMS/hosting IME.
The absolute cheapest blog hosting (including labor) , with minimal telemetry
- $3 per year .click custom domain through AWS . delete the route53 ns service ($6/year, optional)
- cloudflare hosting free tier > 10m requests / mo
- hugo, pelican , jekyll, gatspy etc static-site generator
You can blog and hit > 10k DAU for $3 / year.
That paper.pro landing page is the most infuriating thing I've seen in a long time.
Gave up after a dozen page scrolls...
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