The Cost of Blogging

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]

[1] https://github.com/dllu/dllup-rs

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.

like the time put in to it or the consequences of having it all out there in the public domain etc

[1] https://statamic.com/

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

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.

I handover the markdown to my coding agent when I am done. And everything is ready.

Gave up after a dozen page scrolls...

- $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.