Ask HN: What are the best practices for self hosted blogging?

I've decided to start tech oriented blogging, and it seems that, at least for nerds, the pull is towards self hosted non CMS blogs based off Jekyll and such. My question is: what are the best practices for setting up such a thing in terms of:

Hosting: as a vms? Some kind of s3 thing? Docker image?

Maintenance: is it easy? A pain? Are there things to look out for?

Comments: I've heard of disqus, but an wary of them controlling the content. Are there alternatives or better ways?

Themes: a big draw of WordPress is the themes. Is there similar for non CMS blogs?

Media: do these style of blogs elegantly handle embedded media such as video and images?

SEO: what are the best practices for long term SEO specifically dealing with self hosted blogs?

Other considerations?

2 points | by kstenerud 1862 days ago

2 comments

  • moviuro 1862 days ago
    Hosting: depends what you're comfortable with. I'm using a FreeBSD jail with nginx. Some others have a specific docker image that runs on whatever Linux they like.

    Maintenance: pretty much zero, that's the point of static pages. https://acme.sh for the TLS cert, and you're good to go.

    Comments: use third party tools that are designed for that? such as Twitter, HN, Reddit?

    Themes: http://jekyllthemes.org/

    Media: depends on your server. Maybe a CDN (cloudflare?) could help. I only publish SVG images on my blog, so ATM this isn't something I looked into.

    SEO: I don't care much about that. (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/; https://ssllabs.com; etc.)

    Others: accessibility (colors -- my blog sucks in this regard), semantic web, RSS feed

  • karmakaze 1861 days ago
    I don't know your definition of self-hosted, but I use Hugo with Netlify. It updates whenever you push to a git repo.