The Cost of Blogging

idinnoaname

There are many approaches to this, but it costs me roughly $25 a year to renew my .com domain and pay for my $1 a month vps. Im using an open source cms and pay nothing for fonts because I don't monetize my blog (thus can use any of the non-commercial liscensed fonts). 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.

my002

Publii + Github pages works quite well for writing/CMS/hosting IME.

cadamsdotcom

Pay for the domain, yes. 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.

80fj0348i

I pay $0 each for my websites beyond the domain names. Cloudflare CDN + GitHub pages. For my newer sites I don't even bother with a static site generator, LLMs make writing straight HTML/CSS/a little vanilla javascript super easy. If you use webp/jpegxl for images your bandwidth costs are so low and cacheable you easily fit into free tiers.

aquariusDue

I feel like this is the author's cost when it comes to personal blogging, especially when mentioning paid typefaces. 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!

dogline

- 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 If you stick to static pages, you can host many domains with Hacker News traffic and the compute instance won't break a sweat. https://www.orner.com/projects/

jamietanna

I'm still thoroughly happy with going for a static site for 10ish years - first raw HTML, then Jekyll, now Hugo 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)

adelekeabdulgan

The only thing I paid for for my blog is domain, I use built it up myself, and I write with obsidian. I handover the markdown to my coding agent when I am done. And everything is ready.

kstrauser

If you write a blog with a static site generator (which I highly suggest! Can't hack HTML!), I heartily recommend https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net for hosting. It really is nearly free, price wise, and their policies are like someone scanned my brain for "what do you most wish your vendor would do in all circumstances?".

tonymet

The absolute cheapest blog hosting (including labor) , with minimal telemetry - $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.

barddoo

I've been using Substack to reach the platform public. Anyone have a strong opinion on this? Does that make sense?

tverbeure

* <my name>.github.io * 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.

dllu

> In today’s age of data collection and privacy concerns, I prefer to pay for my blogging platform or hosting. 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

blfr

> When people buy a domain for their blog, it’s a clear sign they intend to stick around. 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.

cosmicgadget

The real cost is the hours spent staring at something I just wrote and hating how poorly it is written.

browningstreet

That paper.pro landing page is the most infuriating thing I've seen in a long time. Gave up after a dozen page scrolls...

featwanz

Surprised I'm not seeing more around self-hosting a blog. I host a Statamic [1] based blog deployed on a TinyMiniMicro PC, the only external service I interact with outside my stack is CloudFlare Tunnel for exposure to the public internet. Am I in complete control of my data? Not really because I am using a closed-source tunnelling service, but at least I am not at the mercy of a cloud services company for hosting my data in the first place. [1] https://statamic.com/