Ask HN: How to start/host a blog

2 points·happyman992··4 comments

I would like to start up a blog/personal page but was wondering if i should buy a wordpress theme and host there or host my own? I just bought my own domain name and there seems to be plenty of free cloud hosting instances out there like heroku Thanks.

View on HN

I'd probably start with free wordpress.com hosting and take it from there.

As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong) Heroku is only for Ruby on Rails apps, where as Wordpress is PHP.

o ok. I was just wondering if most ppl use an already built blog type like wordpress or build their own page and host it on their personal server like dreamhost, amazon aws, etc

It seems there's no real consensus either way, it's a personal choice. But I'd suggest you start with a free one anyways, because then you can get some content on there while you spruce it up. By the time it's pretty enough for you to pimp out you'll have some interesting posts in addition to just a pretty interface.

It really depends if you want to mess around setting up the server, keeping your eye on apache, doing your own db backups, etc or if you just want to click and forget.

FWIW I had a dreamhost shared hosting plan, one click wordpress install and it was great for the first year or so. I learnt wordpress, wrote some content, figured out the plugins I like/need etc... once I hit about 1k uniques/day, the shared hosting really wasn't good enough and I moved everything over to the Rackspace Cloud and have been very happy since.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com