I believe that the most recommended platform for creating blogs and websites nowadays is WordPress. I’ve used WordPress to build a few websites, and when you use it, you quickly understand why it’s so popular: with WordPress, you rarely need to touch code—if you ever do. Need to optimize images? There’s a plugin for that. Want to enhance your site’s security? There’s a plugin for that too. This ease of use is a major draw for the platform.
Why Didn’t I Choose WordPress This Time?
Despite all the convenience that WordPress offers and my familiarity with it, I decided to use a different platform to create this blog.
Before starting, I wanted my hosting to be free. I’ve had other blogs in the past and always ended up feeling discouraged about maintaining them because I was paying monthly for something that didn’t generate any return and was probably only seen by me.
So, I concluded that if I didn’t have to pay for hosting, the blog would stay online much longer, and I would be more motivated to create more posts.
If I had opted for WordPress, I would have had to pay for hosting—there would be no way around it.
The Solution for Free Hosting
There are platforms that offer free hosting, but with some limitations. For example, there is a traffic limit for your site in the free version. However, if your blog starts hitting those limits, it’s probably worth paying for hosting at that point.
Among these platforms, the ones I’m familiar with—and I believe they are the most popular—are Netlify and Vercel. Both platforms offer other web-related products, not just hosting, but that’s not the focus of this post.
The downside of using these hosting platforms is that, if you’re not familiar with coding, GitHub, and related tools, it won’t be as easy to publish your site/blog as it is with WordPress. Fortunately, that wasn’t an issue for me.
So, I already had in mind that I could use these free hosting options and host my blog there. However, I didn’t want to create a blog from scratch in terms of coding, layout, and styling—I just wanted to focus on creating content and posts. So, I went looking for a static site generator. I knew such a thing existed because I had used a generator called Jekyll before, but I didn’t like it much, so I searched for alternatives.
Finding a Static Site Generator
While searching, I came across a generator called Hugo. When I first visited their website, I found it quite simple and wasn’t immediately convinced. But I gave it a chance and started reading the documentation. I saw they had a tutorial on how to host a site on Netlify, so I decided to dive deeper into it.
I followed their tutorial on how to create a site, and I was able to complete all the steps in about 10 minutes. Given how quickly I could set up a simple site, I decided at that moment that I would use Hugo to create this blog.
Is It Worth Following the Same Path?
If you have some technical knowledge of code, HTML, GitHub, and so on, and want to create a static blog or website that isn’t overly complex, I highly recommend doing what I did or something similar. I don’t pay for hosting; my only cost is the domain.