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?".
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.
- 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/
I did something similar. I had Claude fork an anonymous image board, add features to it, fix bugs in it, optimize it, add the ability to import (convert) simple HTML to the boards markup language and then I moved most of my blog posts to it. To keep it challenging the board permits many file types.
The cost for my setup is a little bit more as I wanted it to be able to handle some abuse without the need for a CDN but I think most people would just put such a thing behind Cloudflare on their free tier.
It's not exactly a traditional blog, nor is it a traditional image board. Replies may not get through real time but if they are thought out and do not break US laws or the site guidelines then it is likely they will end up on the site which I think is still a little better than some static blogs which I used to have. It's not for everyone. Well, its probably not for anyone other than me. My emphasis to Claude and Grok was to ensure it does not require JavaScript and makes a best effort to be WCAG compliant and respect peoples motion sensitivity preferences even if I never hire someone to certify it. I don't even know if HN has anyone that benefits from a WCAG compliant site.
Residential Proxies, VPN's and Tor can post but will likely end up in a moderator review queue as in my opinion all image boards should have instead of javascript puzzles or PoW, captchas, crosswalks and traffic lights. Obvious crawlers get nullified.
Oracle use to offer a free compute instance in their cloud offerings. Still does, but people fight when they become available, and will write scripts to watch for them. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Digital Ocean has cheap servers too. AWS is always there, but costs more. You don't need much.
I mean if you switch to pay as you go you can get an Ampere server for free, with no wait. The wait is just for the always free tier. It's a $100 hold, but oracle's never charged me a dime. It is an insane deal, I'll never understand giving away 200gb of disk, 24gb or ram, and 4vcpus for free
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)
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!
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.
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.
The cost for my setup is a little bit more as I wanted it to be able to handle some abuse without the need for a CDN but I think most people would just put such a thing behind Cloudflare on their free tier.
It's not exactly a traditional blog, nor is it a traditional image board. Replies may not get through real time but if they are thought out and do not break US laws or the site guidelines then it is likely they will end up on the site which I think is still a little better than some static blogs which I used to have. It's not for everyone. Well, its probably not for anyone other than me. My emphasis to Claude and Grok was to ensure it does not require JavaScript and makes a best effort to be WCAG compliant and respect peoples motion sensitivity preferences even if I never hire someone to certify it. I don't even know if HN has anyone that benefits from a WCAG compliant site.
Residential Proxies, VPN's and Tor can post but will likely end up in a moderator review queue as in my opinion all image boards should have instead of javascript puzzles or PoW, captchas, crosswalks and traffic lights. Obvious crawlers get nullified.
Digital Ocean has cheap servers too. AWS is always there, but costs more. You don't need much.
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)
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.
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!
I handover the markdown to my coding agent when I am done. And everything is ready.
- $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.