hostStuff: Freeish and Fastish Web Hosting
If you've ever spent any time in the Wordpress community, you know it's a bit bloated, can be slow without serious tuning, and seems to have a never-ending stream of vulnerabilities. You also have to host it somewhere, and that can cost a little money if you want a decent host.
How about an alternative?
This site you are reading, albeit not being very fancy or flashy, is written with an app called Publii, and hosted on GitHub Pages.
Ok, so what's that "freeish" thing up there? It's simple, GitHub Pages is free to use to host static pages, but it comes with some "free service" caveats. The biggest one is that your repositories are public on the free plan. Now, that's not a big deal to me because there's nothing to hack with this site, but I do also use the same GitHub account to host some of my personal programming projects that are too crappy to see the light of day. We're talking much shame upon my bloodline. So I use the paid version which is a whopping four dollars a month.
Publii itself is free, though you can buy plugins and themes from Publii. None of them are necessary though, and none of the paid plugins are in use on this site.
What about the "fastish" part? Well, again, you're using a free service, so you're not getting build priority on GitHub. The pages themselves transfer and render incredibly fast, especially since it's a static site and not running through an engine like WordPress. When you upload your site, it does a build on the GitHub side that can sometimes take a few minutes. Boo hoo, right?
The only other cost coming to mind right now is the $12 to $15 the domain costs. I used to use Google Domains, but they sold the service to Square, so I guess I use Square now. So far no complaints.
Ready to get started? I could write a whole tutorial on this, and I might in the future, but Publii kinda already did for us.
 https://getpublii.com |  https://github.com |
Creating a GitHub Pages site (from Publii themselves)
For reals though, if you try this and run into issues, reach out to me and I'd be happy to help get things sorted out, so you can get to writing your blogsitething at your leisure.
