As for hosting, hosting HTML pages is super easy. The lowest effort for Hugo is GitHub Pages. Netlify is another solid option. https://andrew-quinn.me/ runs on Azure Static Web Apps, but that might take more cloud familiarity than you want to invest in. Or you could just run `hugo` and SCP the resulting directory to a VM!
Ghost for my personal blog and also photography portfolio. Been happily using it for years, easy to self host. Quite surprised not to see more mentions of it here.
Astro SSG. Can easily add Tailwind and React, which I use in my day to day. Got a couple of sites ranked in top 3 for the keywords I'm targeting. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages, for free.
Use a static site generator that is written in a language that you know well, so that you will be comfortable updating it and installing extensions. I use Pelican because I am comfortable with Python. Many people use Jekyll because they are comfortable with Ruby.
I swapped away from Wordpress to Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. The theme is a heavily customized version of Octapress - and its really performant with zero third-party dependencies / network requests.
Plus I like that I can literally click a button in Obsidian which formats a note, compresses/optimizes the media, and pushes it up to my website. Frictionless blog posting FTW.
Wordpress is nice for many reasons, people will pan it for security and such..
install, add firewall like wordfence, change max failed logins to low number.
turn on auto updates for WP and the plugins and themes.
Pull backups auto and free with updraft plugin.
enjoy the massive amount of themes and support around the www
https://steveiscritical.com uses base WP with default theme, I have several others that mod the themeing more.
bonus - skip tutorials that use page builders like elementor - base gutenberg does most the things out of the box these days, not need for extra bloat to be fancy.
Racknerd VPS running Caddy serving a Hugo generated static site. Site and content are created/edited in Emacs and rsynced to server. Took the default Hugo generated theme and tweaked it to my tastes. Forget where I sourced the original CSS I used as a starting point.
I use Jekyll[1]. It's quite popular which implies that it's easy to search for answers online or find steps to some specific customization you might need.
Same, although I recommend not relying on GitHub pages for generating the site due to the age of the gems available on it. I've initially kept my blog compatible with it even though I'm serving it from my NAS, but I ended up ditching compatibility because of that in order to use more modern versions.
But isn't a VPS an inferior option compared to a static host like Netlify? Netlify is free and gets your statics on a global CDN. A VPS is not free and has to serve the statics itself.
I'd use plain HTML+CSS, but Zola adds some nice tools (like markdown rendering). It lives in a single binary, so I don't mind it. Hosted on GitHub pages.
Not personal, but I've started using bullet.so for my company blog (and website).
I like that I can just write stuff in Notion and have it magically appear on a webpage with decent formatting. Not perfect, but fairly easy to setup, customize and maintain.
I recently created a blog website using OpenAI o1, and it’s been great for generating content with minimal effort. If you're looking for something self-hosted, you can check out my project on GitHub here: [https://github.com/mergisi/openai-o1-coded-personal-blog . Let me know if you have any questions or need more details!
As for hosting, hosting HTML pages is super easy. The lowest effort for Hugo is GitHub Pages. Netlify is another solid option. https://andrew-quinn.me/ runs on Azure Static Web Apps, but that might take more cloud familiarity than you want to invest in. Or you could just run `hugo` and SCP the resulting directory to a VM!