from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you still self-host a blog? What's your publishing stack?

by krrishd on 4/1/25, 2:26 AM with 29 comments

Question says it all - I'm curious what the state of the art is for a community like HN (that, intuitively, wouldn't just start an eg. Substack).
  • by chistev on 4/1/25, 5:54 AM

    My personal blog is -

    https://rxjourney.com.ng

    I self host because I love writing code. It's inspired by Medium. It was built with Django and Svelte. I could have written the whole thing with Django but I wanted to learn Svelte, and I had plans of making it bigger and more interactive initially.

    It's hosted on Render.

  • by boricj on 4/1/25, 10:59 AM

    It's hosted on a computer located inside my apartment. It used to be hosted on a cheap Synology NAS. No Cloudflare or CDN or anything like that, just a bare NGINX server.

    The website itself is built on Jekyll, but I want to switch to something else because I don't use Ruby/Gem for anything else and I can't be bothered to commit that stack to memory just for that.

  • by dostoynikov on 4/7/25, 5:20 AM

    https://dostoynikov.com/

    Made with Hugo and hosted on SourceHut. I am not a developer but I can call myself tech-savvy I guess. I love to tinker on my blog a lot; inspire from and discover other blogs.

  • by csomar on 4/1/25, 2:18 PM

  • by mattl on 4/1/25, 3:22 AM

    I edit my posts in a self hosted Ghost site that I run on my laptop as needed and then I use Eleventy to translate that into a static website which gets pushed to Neocities.org via WebDAV (requires the $5 a month plan)

    https://mat.tl/blog/2024/10/29/migrating-from-wordpress-com-...

  • by LinuxBender on 4/1/25, 12:26 PM

    Just nginx and static pre-compressed html and txt files. Publishing stack is my fingers and vim to get spell check. Backups are automated.
  • by wannabebarista on 4/3/25, 11:50 PM

    My personal blog is http://brettcmullins.com

    It is a static site using Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. Although I'm not doing anything fancy, I'm surprised at how flexible Jekyll is when I try to add a feature.

  • by alp1n3_eth on 4/2/25, 11:29 PM

    A lot of aggregators will also not allow your blog to be posted if it's on a newsletter site like Substack, Patreon, etc.

    I use GitHub Pages for hosting, Porkbun for the domain, and Astro for the blog itself. EZPZ to manage and very straightforward, plus Astro's docs are great.

  • by krapp on 4/1/25, 3:11 PM

    Nikola to generate a static site and blog that I never bother updating because Mastodon is easier, and some shell scripts. The script that publishes the site creates a git repo, adds the static files and the remote host, force-pushes to origin and then gets deleted. It's as elegant as it is useless.
  • by fedorvin on 4/4/25, 12:20 AM

    Mine is really simple. I push the changes to git and then pull them through ssh. I am planning to somehow automate the process, but honestly it takes less then 20 seconds so I'm quite happy with it as it is

    (My blog: Fedorvin.com)

  • by lappet on 4/1/25, 5:42 AM

    Hugo, s3 and CloudFront. I use GitHub actions to push to s3, that is my deployment pipeline.
  • by labarilem on 4/4/25, 11:01 PM

    Yep I do, at https://marcolabarile.me/

    Quite simple stack: Jekyll on Github Pages.

  • by leonidasv on 4/6/25, 5:27 AM

    Hugo and Cloudflare Pages: https://leonidasv.com
  • by bergie on 4/1/25, 3:28 PM

    https://lille-oe.de/

    Jekyll on GitHub Pages with various actions to automate stuff like calculating mileage statistics.

    Editing via the GitJournal app.

  • by bvnierop on 4/2/25, 5:46 AM

    Static website written entirely in Emacs' org-mode with a slightly customized publish script that gets executed on a push to `main`. Hosted on GitHub Pages.
  • by asukachikaru on 4/2/25, 4:31 AM

    Hosted on GitHub Pages, built with React. For now I'm using nextjs, but a self-made static site generator is on the roadmap.
  • by petabyt on 4/1/25, 6:00 AM

    I use a from-scratch python script that generates a bunch of html files which are pushed to GitHub pages
  • by aosaigh on 4/1/25, 8:08 AM

    Next.js with SSR, hosted for free with Vercel. I’ve used Jekyll, Django and Craft CMS in the past.
  • by ridiculous_fish on 4/1/25, 3:41 AM

    Jekyll and nginx in Docker on Hetzner for €4.49/mo
  • by skwee357 on 4/1/25, 5:49 AM

    Astro, netlify (in a process to move to a VPS), neovim
  • by quintes on 4/1/25, 3:28 AM

    Jekyll s3 cloudfront
  • by brokegrammer on 4/2/25, 7:28 AM

    Astro hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages.
  • by throwaway519 on 4/1/25, 3:03 PM

    Ethereum.
  • by sharmi on 4/1/25, 3:32 AM

    Astro blog deployed on Github Pages.

    VS Code for editing.

    Points to Ponder

    -> Use the basic Astro template for blogs. It is basically enough for a self-hosted blog needs. Using any of the third party themes/templates with a list of features has a bunch of disadvantages. It takes more effort to customize and upgrading to newer versions totally breaks the setup, sucking in hours of your time.

    -> VS Code has plenty of Markdown Extensions. Markdown Preview and Frontend Masters come to mind.