Advice on how to make a personal website

wise
2018-08-02T09:00:22Z

Hi,

I want to make a personal website, as basic as possible (I don't even want SEO or stuff like that).

This is totally a personal project, I don't want to generate revenue from it or anything like that (at least for now), I just want an old school website to link it to possible employers and contacts. I have about 12 years of coding experience but mostly low-level (DSP, ASM, C, C++) and scientific code (Python, R, Julia). So I'm not scared of doing it from scratch (even though it will be much uglier in the beginning than pre-generated websites) or using some basic lightweight libraries.

Until now I have been using github pages but I want to put some projects that require server side work, so I'll probably have to host somewhere else. I really like tildes' technical goals, but I don't know if the stack it uses is overkill for a personal website (I know I will need some database for some of the projects though).

My questions are:

Is Pyramid a good choice or is it more appropriate for huge multiuser platforms? I do need some level of interaction between users (some of my more artsy projects are related to NLP) as well as interaction between user-server (some projects include simulations with parameters etc.).

How does hosting/DNS work? How much should I expect to spend per year? I know there exist hosting services and also places like Heroku, I don't really know the difference between them or what should I be looking for.

How much should I worry about security? In other words, what is the threat level? I don't plan to have confidential info in the website, or information about the users (other than a hash value). But should I be worried about other kind of threats?

Is making a website as basic as possible and then keep on improving it as time goes a sound plan for a long-term personal project? With this I mean, will it be fun or will it be 100% frustrating and I should just go to (whatever hosting service that has premade web applications) and make my website there even though it will be bloated with scripts and stuff?

Is there something I'm not asking that I should be asking? As I said I know how to code but it feels like web development is a completely different beast sometimes.

Is there any compelling reason for me to use google analytics, SEO, all that stuff that big websites use? I have never understood the point for it in, for example, github pages.

Thanks for your help! Feel free to correct me on any stupid thing I may have said, I definitely speak from ignorance.

Edit: My biggest issue with this kind of format for conversations is that I cannot thank everybody at the same time, and responding to everyone with a thanks is definitely not contributing anything to the conversation. So I'll put it in an edit. Thanks for all your help! I'll probably be coming for more advice soon...

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