The Cost of Blogging
onlinegoddess.net
onlinegoddess.net
Not sure if that is necessary. Tons of great static blog generators these days, like Jekyll and stuff. I personally use my own vibe-coded markdown-based one [1]
Basically you can pick a folder in your file sharing area, map it to your domain or a subdomain of your domain, add an A record at your DNS pointing that to an IP Fastmail provides, and select whether you want it published as a website, a photo gallery, or a redirect to somewhere else.
If you are using your own domain for the website and accept the default of HTTPS Fastmail will deal with getting and deploying a certificate (from Let's Encrypt, I believe).
(BTW, you don't have to have your own domain for this. If you aren't use a custom domain with Fastmail apparently you can still publish static websites from your file hosting space. It will just be on one of the subdomains).
Fastmail accounts also include DNS hosting. If you use them for your DNS then all of this can be managed from the settings in the Fastmail client, which is convenient.
I could use a more robust platform or a vps host which claims better uptime, or even find a cheaper tld for my domaim, but this works fine for me.
This is your biggest cost. You can cut that down to $11.17 if you switch to Cloudflare.
If you want to write, just write.
Been blogging almost monthly since the late aughts, I am just being a complainer.
Added: it's not really the distasteful stuff that substack users sometimes publish on the platform (I'm not big on guilt by association in that regard). I hate the substack software and the expectation that anything on their domain will be somebody's brain fart behind a paywall.
I have some personal static web pages, no blog per se, but some bloggers use Lemmy to federate comments. That seems like a reasonable approach for static blogs if the content isn't too edgy. If you're worried about long term archiving of the comments, you can always archive them yourself with an automated client behind the scenes.
namecrane.com is a good host for shared web hosting if you don't want to use a VPS and run a HTTPD yourself. It starts at $8 per year (bring your own domain). They support tons of existing blogging engines among other things. It's a spin-off from buyvm.net which some of you might be familiar with.
The paid side of it is just in poor taste. Almost inevitably, it leads you down the path to "read the bombshell beyond the paywall, now just $49.99 a year!" sensationalism.
The rest is optional, with good free choices up and down the stack - we're blessed with almost infinite options, paid and free.
It's not easy to have your own little corner online - but it's not hard either. And it doesn't have to cost.
For discovery I really love Bubbles (https://bubbles.town) & they even have RSS feeds.
- Get domain ($20/year)
- Get a cheap compute instance (free or $5/month)
- Tell claude to install nginx and otherwise setup instance
- Tell claude to set DNS(s) to this instance, and modify nginx.conf
- Tell claude to setup a Hugo static site local on your computer
- Add a post in markdown, or tell claude to make one for you
- Tell claude to setup Hugo to make a template that's unique to you
- Tell claude to make shell script to build Hugo and rsync to remote host
Digital Ocean has cheap servers too. AWS is always there, but costs more. You don't need much.
The cost for my setup is a little bit more as I wanted it to be able to handle some abuse without the need for a CDN but I think most people would just put such a thing behind Cloudflare on their free tier. It's still significantly less expensive than off-roading.
It's not exactly a traditional blog, nor is it a traditional image board. Replies may not get through real time but if they are thought out and do not break US laws or the site guidelines then it is likely they will end up on the site which I think is still a little better than some static blogs which I used to have. It's not for everyone. Well, its probably not for anyone other than me. My emphasis to Claude and Grok was to ensure it does not require JavaScript and makes a best effort to be WCAG compliant and respect peoples motion sensitivity preferences even if I never hire someone to certify it. I don't even know if HN has anyone that benefits from a WCAG compliant site.
Residential Proxies, VPN's and Tor can post but will likely end up in a moderator review queue as in my opinion all image boards should have instead of java-script puzzles or PoW, captchas, crosswalks and traffic lights as well as playing OMG hurry whack-a-mole, fighting raids, leaks, etc... Obvious crawlers get nullified.
And simply use Cloudflare generous free tier to host your website and protect it from ddos.
If your static site generator (I use Nikola) has a config for publishing to Github it will probably work with any remote origin.
like the time put in to it or the consequences of having it all out there in the public domain etc
But in the last few years I've been paying for bandwidth on my site - largely due to consistent traffic usage, as well as some big spikes, and lots of scraping! - so I'm currently hitting ~$30/mo on AWS due to needing AWS WAF on top of Cloudfront + S3
(I'd ended up needing to pay much more /mo for Netlify, bandwidth wise, so migrated to AWS)
If you go through comments on some popular post from the golden age of blogging (~2011?), where people's names would link to their sites, the free wordpress.com or whatever blogspot blogs are up much more often than the custom domain ones.
Funnily enough, often the last post on the free blog will be the announcement of switching to a domain, now inactive.
The only thing I'd say anyone needs for blogging specifically is a domain name, but that's more to do with the nature of blogging where the author "owns" the space where the writing lives. When it comes to that there are enough free services that can provide you with the space and subdomain.
There's a weird phenomenon I've been noticing in the last two years-ish where a lot of people have become obsessed with blogging and sharing their thoughts online in their own personal digital space. I've even seen old personal blogs gain a surge of activity in the last year whereas in the years prior there would be at most a post per year.
Also regarding the point about text editors I've never understood why people use dedicated markdown editors? I thought the whole point of Markdown was minimal formatting that's hassle-free to write in whichever text box you happen to find yourself in making dedicated software kinda redundant, no? As opposed to something like Org where you rely on org-mode in Emacs otherwise GOOD LUCK when editing it "by hand".
I apologize if this comes off as a rant, I've actually enjoyed this particular post!
* markdown files
* push to GitHub
* their Jekyll actions take care of the rest
I don’t see the point in paying for my own domain. I hate it that sources of great information disappear when the owner passes away. Chances are that GitHub pages will exist longer than I do. But if not, I can still move my business somewhere else.
- $3 per year .click custom domain through AWS . delete the route53 ns service ($6/year, optional)
- cloudflare hosting free tier > 10m requests / mo
- hugo, pelican , jekyll, gatspy etc static-site generator
You can blog and hit > 10k DAU for $3 / year.
I handover the markdown to my coding agent when I am done. And everything is ready.
Gave up after a dozen page scrolls...