Sean Collins

Blog Hosting Comparison

I am one of the many humans in the tech industry that would like to start a blog, would enjoy writing about things that are relevant to their interests, and are otherwise keen on using blogging as a creative outlet for themselves and their ideas. I have re-built my blog more times than I can count, only to consistently get stuck in the design phase and ultimately fail to produce content. I have used static site generators like Gatsby, Astro, and Hugo. I have used frameworks that are static site adjacent like Next.js and Nuxt. Most recently, I have even dabbled with Fresh and the Deno ecosystem. I have even gone full stack at one point or another with platforms like Ghost and even :shudder: Wordpress.

Because of this constant back and forth, rebuilding my blog and personal site became more important than the content that I would like to produce. Chalk this up to a constant interest in front-end development, a general excitement for new libraries and frameworks, or maybe even a good old-fashioned dose of technology ADHD. At the end of the day, I needed to take a step back and think about what I was trying to produce and not how I was trying to produce it. Thus, I went down a different path, and I found that my life became increasingly simpler as I began to entertain solutions that left me with only the ability to produce content. Given that, I'd like to go through some of the options I have entertained, and how I may have ranked them against one another.

Below are some high-level options for how I would potentially go about building and then maintaining a blog and personal website. This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are simply the areas that I found myself most interested in as I explored the topic. Some of these were familiar to me, but others were options that I had not yet previously considered.

Self-hosted

My background covers quite a few programming languages. There are so many ways to create a website, and there are so many technologies to do it with. Not everything is a static site, of course, and sometimes it is fun to experiment with new languages and stacks along the way. With this option, I could take advantage of all of those options, use self-hosted private analytics, self-hosted CI/CD pipelines, and be able to use either full-stack, front-end alone, or static site generated content. While appealing, it also introduces some operational burden that I know I may personally get hung up on.

Cloud VPS

This option is strikingly similar to self-hosted, but the cost will increase since I will have to pay for compute, memory, and storage resources on a shared platform. There are some operational benefits in the sense that this is not exposing my personal environment to the internet, and I can leverage network and DDoS protections from some of these VPS offerings. It's a good middle-ground, but it comes at a cost because it is no longer your machine and your internet connection (yes, those are costs too, but they are largely suck for me).

Static Site Hosts

Options like Vercel, Netlify, and Firebase spring to mind, but those are based on what I have experience with. I know that there are others out there in the wild, but those two are probably the de facto standards for deploying static sites in 2023. Sure, you can do this with Azure, GCP, and AWS, but that is more setup than I think I would be willing to invest in. Also, those come at a cost as well due to potentially limited free tiers. Having used these solutions in the past, these are serious contenders. Given that, I'd have to build my own site, or use a template, but most of everything operationally would be alleviated from my concern.

Alternative Platforms

I could not really find a term for these, but I do see the term "small web" associated with offerings in this space. These can best be described as unique, quirky, and fun alternatives to all of the above. These are independent companies trying to carve out a special niche in the world. The two that spring to mind the most are Bearblog and omg.lol. Both seem to be relatively new entries in this space and worthy of some support. They are fast, consistent, and not self-managed. The styles are minimal, but if the focus is on content then I am not all too concerned about that.

This is a lot to ponder on, and I shall update this or follow up with another post as I flesh out my ideas and see how each of these operate in the real world.

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