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How would you go about a low maintenance personal website today?

It seems like there's a lot of ways to go about this that may be overkill, so I'm curious which may avoid that.

Low maintenance in this context is aiming for moderate technical knowledge/setup, lower cost, and portability in case you need to migrate your site and so minimal hassle in that process.

45 comments
  • Using Jekyll for static site generation and throwing it on GitHub Pages is what I've been doing for a few years.

    Netlify is a nice alternative to GH Pages for hosting. Cloudflare Pages also exists but never tried it before.

  • Depends™

    If I don't expect many changes I would do a simple HTML page. Maybe with PHP to include the layouts on multiple sites.

    If I or a relative should be able to edit it now and then I would use WordPress without any plugins. Set it to auto-update and call it a day.

  • This won't be helpful, but reading this thread makes me think about my angelfire website from, idk, 1998? I had that and a HTML 4.0 bible. Good times. Deleted times 😑

    I read that the fediverse equivalent to bandcamp is using a webring, maybe there is or will be a fediverse hosting ecosystem?

  • I'll add a quick point that might not be obvious. There are actually three things you'll need to consider: a domain name, hosting, and your content.

    TL;DR: for a simple blog-ish site, I would recommend DreamHost shared starter plan (USD$84 per year after promotions end, includes a custom domain name) and use GetSimple as the basis for your site (which can be installed from the DreamHost panel). Email costs a little more though.

    A domain name typically costs less than USD$20 per year, with some top-level domains (like .online or .xyz) being only a few dollars per year. There are lots of ways to set up a site with a free subdomain (yoursite.hostingprovider.com) if cost is a barrier, but buying your own makes for a shorter and cleaner website name, and you can take it with you if you want to change your hosting. Most companies that offer domain registration will offer hosting as well, and they sometimes bundle them (a low-cost plan on DreamHost includes one domain name for free). Owning your own domain name usually means you have more options for setting up email as well.

    For hosting, there are lots of free and easy options that others have mentioned (github pages, etc). Typical low-cost plans from many dedicated hosting companies are around USD$5 per month. Paying for hosting gives you more options for what you can do with your site--if you want WordPress, for example, github pages won't be a hosting option. I've had a great experience with DreamHost, and BlueHost is a solid option as well.

    Finally, generating the pages is its own challenge, and there are some wildly different ways of doing it. As others mentioned, I would avoid anything with a database if you can (WordPress being the big one). If you want a blog-ish type of site, I recommend GetSimple (I've had a few non-technical friends who were very happy with it). Or you can use a static site generator, though the workflow for many of those is often not as easy in my experience. Or if you're feeling plucky, you can write the pages in HTML, CSS, and JS, and/or throw some PHP in there. I use skeleton for my site.

  • If you are looking for true low maintenance, avoid needing a DB. So I'd stay away from the WordPress suggestions. Not to mention keeping WordPress CVE free is often a full time job and the opposite of low maintenance.

    I'd use one of the many tools out there that takes Markdown and coverts it to HTML, stick that in a basic CI job on Gitlab or Github to build out my HTML and I just write markdown.

    Once that's in place how I would decide if I wanted a custom domain.

    If I don't need a custom domain, then I can just augment the pipeline to publish to Gitlab/Github pages.

    If I want a custom domain then it depends on budget and expected traffic, but I'd likely just put it on an ECS container or in an S3 bucket and shove cloudfront in front of it, because if it's small enough it will likely qualify for free tier AWS. If it's too big for free tier then I'd stick with a container but likely either put it on a cheap cloud node with Apache and letsencrypt and one of the smaller providers like Linode/DO/Vultr

45 comments