Super simple website setup hosted at no costs
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A couple of days ago I decided to setup a personal website again.
🎯 My requirements have been
- mobile optimize
- support for Google Stories
- low effort
- low cost
- low operational burden
I decided to go with Hugo as static site generator. In the past Jekyll was my static website generator of choice, but Hugo got some traction in recent years and was on my check it out list. Plus: It is written in Go and very fast.
With Hugo, I write my blog posts in Markdown. Hugo comes with a local test server and a simple single command generates the static website. This is similar to how it works with other static site generators like Jekyll.
As I wanted to have an Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) page, I chose the Amperage theme to get started quickly.
You might wonder why I have AMP as a requirement? AMP helps to create a good user experience on mobile. Apart from that I want to play around with Google Stories. And Google Stories is AMP based. So I thought, that it could make sense to have the whole website AMP based. Yet, I am not sure, if this will be any good. We will see.
I set up this website on an infrastructure provider I did not use before. It is served from Netlify. They have a global infrastructure with Content Delivery Network (CDN) and such. The free package serves me well. Looks good so far.
My preferred option would have been to host the site from a Google Cloud Storage Bucket, but for SSL a paid load balancer would have been required.
The Hugo theme and content is on Github and I have set up an automated deployment to netlify.
Result:
- posts written in markdown
- content on github
- pipeline that generates mobile optimized website with Hugo
- automatically deployed to Netlify’s global infrastructure
- easily set up ✔️
- no operational burden ✔️
- no costs ✔️
- played around with some tech I did not use before ✔️
What is your tech stack of choice when setting up a simple website? Let me know via Twitter or LinkedIn.