What webhost and software do you use for your personal website?

I use Github Pages. Nothing beats free. It helps that it’s a static portfolio, not a blog, so updates are fairly infrequent.

Way back when I used 000webhost or some other free host (can’t quite remember the name.) I learned my lesson when it all got deleted 😄 At least if Github decides to stop making it free I’m pretty sure there will be enough heads up to save the content.

I host my website myself, I have public IP and 24/7 running PC. I wrote my website (blog) myself.

Maybe those are the reasons it doesn't work at all at the moment.

I myself use nearlyfreespeech.net to host, it's pretty cheap managed hosting. Just dump your files in over SSH and away you go. Software-wise, I'm just very foolishly writing all my HTML and CSS myself and regretting every moment of it.

Mine is statically generated website that I host on Netlify.

I use Zola to generate the website. The site “source code” is written in Markdown with some templates and style sheets written HTML and SCSS. The source sits in a GitHub repository.

I’ve connected the repository to Netlify, so whenever there’s a new commit, Netlify automatically picks it up, runs zola build and deploys the output.

Until a few days ago, I was using my own static site generator written in Python. It was tiny (<100 SLOC) and worked fine for many years. But it had some quirks and didn’t have support for many features found in other static site generators. So I decided to migrate to a ready-made solution. Fortunately Zola was almost a drop-in replacement.

I have the cheapest Hetzner VPS, with nginx to serve (or act as a reverse proxy) the few personal sites/services I host. I use that as a playground.
My "main site" is a Vue 3 app, and my blog is built from Sveltekit.

I use hostinger for my webhost and happy with it so far! It's inexpensive and straightforward.

I'm using a very basic PHP CMS that I built for myself. No database, no admin, just flatfile. It basically lets me create "gallery pages" on my website by just creating folders and dumping images in the folders. The web design is just HTML and CSS and I update via FTP. I write garbage code but it works, and I can leave the site structure alone for years without updating it and nothing breaks.

For my other website I used Airtable as the backend/content and then softr.io as the frontend. (Just free accounts on both since I'm not a heavy user.) It works well if you just need a nice way to display your Airtable content.

I'm using DigitalOcean for my personal site right now, which has been acceptable for basic plain servers and kubernetes, but lately I've been using Vercel for some toy projects and I'm liking it a lot. It has GitHub integration so you can push to deploy new changes, it will deploy other branches to test URLs so you can try them out live, it can run build steps, you can use a custom domain with it, and it has a free tier. Vercel also happens to make the great Next.js framework which I've been using with it.

I purchase and manage my domains and manage DNS through Porkbun

I use Vercel to host my projects, which are a mixture of static websites, 11ty, and nextjs. I've chosen them because their free tier is generous, and they make integration and CD extremely easy. This also automates using certbot and getting SSL setup.

The code for my websites is on github, and uses vercels CD to automatically deploy when I push changes.

My personal site is at https://llblumire.co.uk

I'm currently decomissioning the last of my nginx sites which are on a digitalocean server, and migrating fully over to the setup above. I've eliminated basically all of my costs (just paying for domains on most sites now)

I have a somewhat private server. I mostly use it to host game servers for friends or to run tests that run for a longer while. I do host my friends band page on it, that I wrote for them. This should be the only public facing site.

Its just a static html/css page, it doesnt need to do much and its instantly opened. As I dislike trackers, there is no need for a cookie banner which is sadly a rare sight these days.

For this reason, its just a domain pointing to an ovh vps. Its very barebones and only contains the newest kernel+http proxy+docker+fail2ban and similar safeguards. That makes it very easy to configure and to keep slim.

I used to use Ghost as a blog for a few clients(self hosted), and they were usually happy with it. This was four-five years ago, so I dont know how well you can extend it like Wordpress today, but I usually got good feedback for its minimalistic approach and fast loading times.

The more boring this vps is, the better. I dont really enjoy it very much nowadays and I am happy when everything runs as it should.

I'm definitely not as technical as everyone else here, but I use WordPress. It's easy enough for me to use, flexible enough for my use case, and cheaper than Squarespace. My site is a static portfolio. I host on Namecheap's shared hosting plan for $45/year and it works for me because I don't get much traffic.

If you're not a fan of WordPress I still recommend Namecheap as a host cause it's so cheap.

I’ve tried everything but nowadays I use Django/Wagtail for anything like that.

I use the hatchling plan at HostGator and I coded my personal website based on a W3.CSS template. It works pretty well for me. It's pretty much a static website that I update every now and again. I also have a blog with Github Pages that uses Jekyll. That works okay, but theming is very bare because I haven't taken the time to figure it out.

I use handwritten HTML on S3. Mainly because I haven’t bothered to update it in forever.

I host mine on github pages and use pelican static generator to churn out the pages. Thinking of switching back to jekyll as github natively supports it.

I run all my websites in an AWS EC2 instance running debian and nginx. It's way too expensive for what it is, but at least I get to have some hands on experience with AWS. I also have some smaller projects running on netlify and vercel, but I don't think I would run anything important off them.

Thankfully, nobody uses any of my websites, but I'm not looking forward to making a real website that people would actually use. Server and storage costs add up really fast, it's like death by paper cuts. I really have no idea how the big websites are able to pull it off.

I use Bridgetown to generate a static site, powered by CMS that runs on my home server. The idea is to have as many inputs as possible to increase the chance to actually write something :P.

For example I have a telegram integration, so I can write a quick post (notes) of things I come across when browsing, or upload a photo from my phone and post it right away.

The CMS triggers a Netlify build, and Bridgetown consumes the API to generate the pages.

I'm in the process to dumb this all down to just a single (Rust) binary that renders dynamic pages like it's 1999. I'll run that from my home, and maybe front it with a CDN such as Bunny.net.

The reason for the custom CMS is that I blog about my travels and they contain a lot of photos' (think 10.000+), and most static site generators can't handle that amount, most of them try to optimise images when building, which takes ages. The CMS resizes the photos and uploads them to a CDN and since I need that anyway, it's not a lot more effort to have it store the text content too.

I have a cheap vps on ssdnodes that I just throw everything on. Use it for whatever projects I'm working on at the time. if I want to update any sites on it, I just scp my local copy of the site to the relevant folder. It's no more than a meg or two of text an images, so it isn't worth doing anything more complex than that.

I self-host on my home server/NAS behind a reverse-proxy to a Google Cloud load balancer. I use Elixir/Phoenix (which I really recommend!) and have the whole thing dockerized, including database migrations, so I can easily deploy it. The NAS runs UnRaid, but anything capable of running Docker Compose (and I self-hostmessing with ports) would work.

edit: Using Google Cloud Domains for my domain registrar, although that'll change over to CloudFlare next year due to the recent acquisition.

I went from a static html/css on Netlify -> Bear Blog with a custom domain

I just got tired of editing html/css to create. I've tried all sorts of other blogging platforms and tools, and shared webhosting, static site generators, etc and just none of it ever really "fit" me right

I wanted a system that would be extremely minimal tech-wise but also give me less friction when editing the site or making posts and Bear Blog fit that pretty well.

@scojjac For decades now (my first site was mid/late 1997), I've tried multiple approaches from Blogger to low-cost shared hosting to Wordpress to currently self-hosting a static site on a low-cost VPS provider, etc. etc. Over the years i would spend so much time on the infrastructure and/or application setup and/or CMS setup that i distracted myself from actually writing...so over the last few years i just stuck to a few basic static (hand-crafted) html pages and a tiny bit of css. (I save time by simply manually copying-pasting the html template from last post to a new onw...it saves time due to my simple sites nowadays.) I will say that those years of playing so much with infrastructure and dev. stuff did help me with my tech career, so its not a total loss. But, nowadays, my hope is that being content with the simplest infrastructure can give me the space to focus more on writing...though lately my writing has favored private content and not always appropriate for public display/consumption...funny how life happens, eh?

If your intent is simply to publish your thoughts or media (e.g. photography) out into the world, here is my advise to you:

• Use a mechanism or platform that gives you total control of your content...You should have sovereignty over your content. Be prepared to pay money for this freedom. If Bear blog allows you to occasionally export/archive your content so you can migrate to another platform in the future, then cool, keep using Bear blog. If not, then find another mechanism to publish your thoughts where you are in control. Again, you should pay for hosting; you get what you pay for.
• Use a tool that is quick and easy to publish your content. Don;'t adopt a tool that creates such a cumbersome process/workflow for you. There's a reason static site generators are (still) popular: because they help folks accomplish what they want with respect to publishing their thoughts without too much fancy trinkets and with speed (I'm referring to speediness of publishing, but of course static sites help with speed on the consumption side too).
• Worry less about the appearance and/or underlying tech stack if that begins to distract you from your goal of publishing your content.
• Publish more.
• Publish more.
• Publish more!
  :-)

I host mine using App Engine on Google Cloud. It's a single page with a tiny bit of PHP and also hosts me resume. I only get a few dozen visits a month, so it fits well within their free tier.

I'm afraid I do use wp CMS because I could never get my head around Drupal, and my site eventually had way too many parts and files to work well anymore with html (plus I can't write code for toffee).

I've had an ongoing problem in New Zealand with my hosts being bought out from under me by big conglomerates, so it moves a lot.

Recently migrated to MyHost to escape CrazyDomains.

When I first heard CrazyDomains Dubai was about to buy my previous host, I immediately migrated my business website to a NZ server, but I stupidly left my personal website at Crazy to see what it was like. (Big mistake. They are the worst and most dishonest company I've had the displeasure of dealing with in a long time. They told me they had sold me space on a server that could not be accessed unless I paid them several hundred dollars to fix it - bizarre. Obviously I noped out of there).

I've been mucking about with Jekyll, GitHub Pages, and Ghost on a mishmash of free-tier IaaS and SaaS providers. We're spoiled for choice these days.

I'm running Hugo on an Arch Linux server on a Linode cloud instance. Costs me five dollars a month. It's a simple static site that loads super fast. I'm a noob so it's fun to learn for me as it seems pretty manual, you write everything in markdown, etc. There's some decent open source themes available for it too.

GitHub Pages. Free has been less important to me than not having to maintain it at all, even if I don't touch it for years at a time.

I have a tiny Linode server that I pay $5/month for and I run a basic LAMP stack + Wordpress on it. It’s been working great for my needs for about 5 years now.

A VPS with ARP networks, with whatever webserver OpenBSD has by default. Running your own SMTPD can still be done, no problem.

Literally just a raspberry pi with cloudflare and an automated script that is run to update the IP in cloudflare. Running like that for 7 years straight off an USB stick.

But I also don't use prewritten CMS's, so it's not overloaded with janky scriptididoo frontend bs and overcomplicated backend that I don't need to display my website.

I'm using nginx as the webserver.

I use Easy PHP Devserver on my local machine to tinker around and develop stuff. If I make something that I want other people to see then I use basic shared hosting at Namcheap.

I use Hugo as the SSG, GitHub pages as the host. When I push a change to my repo, GitHub actions builds the static site and publishes it to Pages. Free, and very straightforward. I’ve also used Netlify and Vercel in the past for similar things with great results.

I’ve basically swapped all domains over to CloudFlare at this point because of their cheap wholesale pricing. I may use Porkbun if there is a good deal and then swap to CF at renewal time.

I use ghost with the Casper theme on my homeserver.

https://thomcat.rocks/blog

Shared hosting on Namecheap for ~$30/yr that lets me host up to 3 websites. I got mine and a friend's Wordpress websites on it currently.

I have a static site hosted on Sourcehut Pages which I build with Zola, it's very lightweight so I'm basically handwriting HTML and CSS but I can use templates if I need and it compiles SCSS so I can use nested selectors without worrying about browser support. I manage my domain/DNS through Porkbun and I'm quite happy with them.

I'm slowly moving away from Github as much as I can, because I don't want to use anything approaching 80% market share. Sourcehut Pages is also free, it might be a little slower but that's nothing a CDN wouldn't fix (I've heard good things about bunny.net). I also plan to use Plausible analytics in the future, which complies with GDPR so it doesn't require a consent banner. It's even self-hostable, although its very cheap anyway.

I've done it all. I've self hosted Apache and Nginx, then paid for hostcheap, namecheap, webhostingUK, but I've managed to get a seriously good deal with 20i who are StackDNS. They have a really good CDN cache and their hosts are all fast and load balanced.

I've run my own blog on Wordpress for donkeys and now my wife's e-commerce site for hand crafted bits (I'll shout out thunderlizard.co.uk and simply not hyperlink it!) With WooCommerce. I think 20i are one of the neatest and fastest hosts I've used after bare metal on my own hardware at home.

Personally, I also bare metal host a NextCloud for myself using Nginx because I've uncoupled from Google services. It's not as good but at least I know all my pics and video are full resolution and backed up correctly (restic to Backblaze off of the NAS storage used as target for my NextCloud files).

I use Neocities. It's not perfect but it's cheap and fine for my usecase, so I've never had reason to look for better. Its built in directory helps a lot when it comes to finding new sites and making your own one known. https://debleb.fun/

Hugo + Netlify connect to Github.