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

by krrishdon 4/1/2025, 2:26 AMwith 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 chistevon 4/1/2025, 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 boricjon 4/1/2025, 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 dostoynikovon 4/7/2025, 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 csomaron 4/1/2025, 2:18 PM

Github pages: https://github.com/abid-personal/abid-personal.github.io -> makes -> https://omarabid.com

The static site is made with nextjs. This template: https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog

by mattlon 4/1/2025, 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 LinuxBenderon 4/1/2025, 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 wannabebaristaon 4/3/2025, 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_ethon 4/2/2025, 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 krappon 4/1/2025, 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 fedorvinon 4/4/2025, 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 lappeton 4/1/2025, 5:42 AM

Hugo, s3 and CloudFront. I use GitHub actions to push to s3, that is my deployment pipeline.

by labarilemon 4/4/2025, 11:01 PM

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

Quite simple stack: Jekyll on Github Pages.

by leonidasvon 4/6/2025, 5:27 AM

Hugo and Cloudflare Pages: https://leonidasv.com

by bergieon 4/1/2025, 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 bvnieropon 4/2/2025, 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 asukachikaruon 4/2/2025, 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 petabyton 4/1/2025, 6:00 AM

I use a from-scratch python script that generates a bunch of html files which are pushed to GitHub pages

by aosaighon 4/1/2025, 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_fishon 4/1/2025, 3:41 AM

Jekyll and nginx in Docker on Hetzner for €4.49/mo

by skwee357on 4/1/2025, 5:49 AM

Astro, netlify (in a process to move to a VPS), neovim

by quinteson 4/1/2025, 3:28 AM

Jekyll s3 cloudfront

by brokegrammeron 4/2/2025, 7:28 AM

Astro hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages.

by throwaway519on 4/1/2025, 3:03 PM

Ethereum.

by sharmion 4/1/2025, 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.