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kartik puri
kartik puri

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What are your preferred ways of hosting a blog? I like static blog hosted on s3 or netlify

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wulymammoth profile image
David • Edited

Interesting. Don’t you have to register for AWS and walkthrough setting up a bucket?

I think it’s just as easy using Hugo...

  1. generate new post from template using a CLI command
  2. author post (markdown)
  3. hugo command and it’ll do the following: generate the static page and provide other static updates like (prev, next) links, add to a table of contents, etc (these features are stock with Hugo)
  4. push to GitHub

Not sure why you’re hosting on AWS in an S3 bucket over GitHub Pages unless you don’t do anything with GH. I also like Render as a free hosting option for static pages. Their docs and support are awesome.

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kartikpuri95 profile image
kartik puri

I have multiple static hosting on s3, so I always prefer s3 apart from that I use CDN so everything stays on the AWS side.

setting up bucket is just a one-time process later you can just copy the setting and create multiple buckets

I prefer gridsome because with that I have the liberty to connect any cms in the future and it is also powered in Vuejs. So, being a vuejs developer it's a +1 for me
I tried Jekyll before using GitHub pages but again Jekyll tech stack is something that I don't use too often so when it comes to code digging I don't like it much.

The best part of gridsome that no other static site generator give is the ability to query your data using Graphql with graphql I can really pull the content very neatly however I want and from any source

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wulymammoth profile image
David • Edited

That’s fair. It sounds like you gave yourself a reason to use a Vue-based static site generator. That’s cool, too. It sounds like you want more than just a simple blog. Sounds more like you plan on building a full site out of it on the JAMstack. Why does a CDN here matter? My blog barely receives a view a week

For simple blogs with no intention of making it do more than be a collection of static text and a few pieces of embedded media, I still believe the easiest way to start a blog as a dev with zero cost versus using Medium or some other entity that owns it is Jekyll or Hugo hosted on GitHub Pages (no need to register on AWS or Render or Digital Ocean, etc). I sort of know what you mean when you don’t want to go mucking around in the code, but I don’t think you really need to. I write mostly Ruby and I don’t like Jekyll. I write some Golang which is what Hugo is built with but I’ve not had to look at a single line of its source code or any Go at all. I set up my blog only a month ago. Hugo builds any new post in less than a second compared to Jekyll and I’m that it does to same compared to JS/Node

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kartikpuri95 profile image
kartik puri

Yes, you are right
Regarding the CDN what's the harm in using that, its still future proof even if there are lakhs of visitor suddenly.

Being a developer AWS just routine stuff when comes to day to day coding so ya it might intimidate someone who is really a beginner so i guess that was the reason i might have opted for Jekyll because deployment using markdown is painless

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wulymammoth profile image
David

The harm is cost. CDNs don’t come free - whether it is Cloudfront, Cloudflare, or Fastly. It also requires configuration. I thought we were talking about building a blog? I don’t know of too many that get slammed with traffic. I think my GitHub pages hosted blog could handle massive load given that it’s hosted on GH infrastructure. Right? I’ll move it to AWS if it falls over. Not likely though.

Hmm. AWS is not painless. Some things are easier than others. I’ve used quite a number of their services — EC2, Beanstalk, RDS, S3, Cloudfront. I also have my own apps and I still much prefer to deploy to Heroku or Render. As a dev, I much prefer to spend time writing the application code for the feature that I plan to accomplish than muck around in the infrastructure needed to let my application run. Why make it hard for myself having to jump through hoops? I’m not saying it’s hard. It’s kind of like why type “git —help” when you can just type “git -h”. Both yield the same result, but one requires more typing.

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kartikpuri95 profile image
kartik puri • Edited

Heroku is amazing stuff... pricing is something that I don't use it often.

Other than that i don't like to leave AWS because why spread the things elsewhere when you can just keep it at one place

also when it comes to the pricing of CDN its negligible, to be honest, and if you are getting charged on AWS cloudfront then your site is actually doing wonders

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kartikpuri95 profile image
kartik puri • Edited

I use gridsome to build my blog and use code ship to deploy it to s3.

My Posting flow looks like this -:

  1. I use stackedit.io/ to connect my markdown folder in the repository
  2. I write the markdown post and hit sync on the stackedit
  3. Sync will push my markdown file to master branch and code ship will do the magic to deploy it to S3 bucket

The best part of having such blog is zero-footprint, no server cost, no hosting cost nothing, Only pay request charge for s3 which is next to negligible

Here is my blog chopcoding.com

Let me know you thoughts