A long while back, I naively decided to create a self hosted rails site to host my personal site from. I played around with these grandeur ideas of providing immersive content that would illuminate the mind and dazzle the eyes. Well, long story short, developing content with some crazy customization requires an order of magnitude more effort. Effort that may not even provide any value to your end users. As an entrepreneur and someone chronically short on time, I wanted a minimalist site with blogging capabilities. My full wish list for my personal site design & hosting suite looked something like this:
- No fuss maintenance
- Simple markdown to html blog creation
- Free hosting
- Sub 100ms time to first byte
- Git push deploy triggers
- Https integration
Enter the Hugo Netlify Combo
First on the scene is Hugo, an amazing tool to build statically generated sites. Everything from the go templating genius to it’s clean CLI interface, have been a god send. Writing blogs in Hugo is great. Hugo gives you the ability to use markdown and embed article specific information. The maintenance on a statically generated site is child’s play. Check off the first two wishes.
How does 2ms time to first byte and 2ms full downloads of HTML sound to you?
Now it was time to find a hosting solution, one that I can be very hands off with. Netlify to the rescue. Netlify’s JAM stack is an extremely friendly environment to develop in. Every time I push to my github repo, Netlify regenerates my Hugo site and serves it up. Worth noting, the Netlify CDN serves up assets lightning fast by the way. How does 2ms time to first byte and 2ms full downloads of HTML sound to you? The buck doesn’t stop here. In about 10 minutes, you can setup SSL, using the Let’s Encrypt API. Did I mention you get all this for free :-D.
Check off the rest of my wish list. Getting everything switched over to my new Hugo/Netlify setup only took a couple hours. The new setup requires next to no maintenance and adding/changing content is as easy as git push. I highly recommend you experiment with it if you value your time!