How would you go about a low maintenance personal website today?
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.
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My answer assumes:
- "personal website" means you want a blog with a few static pages
- "moderate technical knowledge" means you know how to use a CLI and write some basic JS/CSS.
For this use case, I highly recommend a static site generator framework like Hugo.
Make a repository on GitHub for your Hugo website, and set up your content as markdown files inside the repository.
Then, hook your Hugo website's repository up to a managed static site hosting solution like AWS Amplify or GitHub Pages. Finally, set up your website's domain name and you're done.
Once these pieces are set up your authoring workflow is:
- Open your Hugo website locally from a local copy of the Git repo and edit the markdown files to change the content of your site
- Once you're happy, commit the result
- Amplify / Github pages will automatically pick up the change and redeploy your site with the new content
And that's it. There's no servers to maintain, so the only upgrade you have to do is keep Hugo and any dependencies up to date within your repo.
I've been using Hugo since 2017. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Thanks, the assumptions are about where I was aiming so this addresses the question pretty well I think.
An added question that this and other comments bring to mind though is, and this is admittedly a super basic question (which I've gone back & forth over asking in NoStupidQuestions tbh), but besides a cleaner and exclusive URL, why might someone go after a domain for a personal site, as in related to them individually?
Brand recognition if you're in the market for a job relevant to the contents of your site or if you plan to run a blog.
Otherwise custom domain is really just vanity.
If you don't have SOME domain name, then people can only visit your site with an IP address.
Additionally, you pretty much have to have a domain name if you want HTTPS encryption - if you don't have an HTTPS certificate, people's browsers will show lots of scary warning indicators on your page.
But if you're asking about buying your own domain name (firstname-lastname.com) vs. using a subdomain from your hosting provider (myblog.wordpress.com) then it comes down to preference. Having your own domain will make you look more professional and get you more clicks on average.
But if you’re asking about buying your own domain name (firstname-lastname.com) vs. using a subdomain from your hosting provider (myblog.wordpress.com) then it comes down to preference. Having your own domain will make you look more professional and get you more clicks on average.
Mainly the latter, and you cover the reasons for that, so appreciate it! For a more casual approach (and according to one's preferences), it sounds like you'd be alright to stick with the subdomain-from-host approach, which is how I was leaning but I wasn't sure if there might be more to it than that within the more managed hosting space.
If a subdomain from a hosting provider works for your use case, then there's nothing wrong with that.
I have 10 years of experience making websites for a living for huge tech companies, and even then I still use ec2-[hash].compute-1.amazonaws.com as the domain name for a gaming website I run for just my friends.
If you don't care about professionalism or SEO then its fine.