I have the same problems as both OP and the blogger: I want absolutely nothing to do with the hosting of the blog itself. I just want it to be a writing platform, a very very simple one, and nothing more.
This allows me to do plenty of things. There are no servers to manage, and I write my posts with vim and use Markdown. I have a simple theme. Deployment and testing happens automatically through Amplify.
If I really, really, absolutely must, I can dig deeper into Hugo and do whatever I want. But if I just want to stick to the basics, I write files in the content folder and edit the settings file the first time. That's it!
And because it's in AWS, I can use cert manager and Route53, things I already know from work, to put my domain on it.
This was a lot easier for me than anything else. I previously used Ghost hosted on a Digital Ocean instance, but I quickly grew tired of having to update Ghost, dealing with node, etc. Plus having to worry about securing the site and the instance. Patching the instance. Backups.
How about Hugo’s stability when upgrading? I haven’t tried it myself, but have read many a comment (including on HN) on how even minor version upgrades end up breaking things.
I honestly haven't updated! Or at least, not purposely. The package in Ubuntu's repo is at v0.68.3 which was released at the end of March. So apparently I updated at least once. Latest version is 0.74.3.
A lot of the updates I am missing seem to be simple bug fixes.
