a question for tech people, web hosting, boost ok
Whamt to create my personal website:
- hosted in a not-totally-bonkers jurisdiction, perhaps an EU country
- good domain registrar with contact privacy, without scammy behaviour
- static page generator, no Wordpress and its thousands of holes
- easy for me to use it, so that I can put my writing in a place, without too much tech distracting me
Where should I start looking? Do you have any recommendations for a service provider where I can do all these things with ease? And the typical cost? The site will be mostly text, definitely no data-heavy stuff such as video.
a question for tech people, web hosting, boost ok
- a large hosting provider will have data centres around the world, so i'm not sure what “jurisdiction of hosting” actually means—it may be more complicated than where the server and data physically sits. if you care about price, DDoS protection, uptime, etc, a large provider like Linode is probably your best bet—but does a Linode server in Frankfurt Germany count as “hosted in Europe”? in some senses maybe yes, but Linode is still an American company.
- i'm not sure there is such a thing as a good domain registrar; DNS registration is in essence kind of a grift. every registrar wants you to buy names you don't need and will try to sell you things which aren't useful (like blockchain names) because that's how they make their money. if there IS a good one i haven't met it (and don't trust it will stay good); personally i would shoot for “easy to use and won't screw me over” here and not expect to find anything better than that
- regarding the last two points, these are a tooling problem not a hosting problem, imo. IF YOU CAN (a) find a cheap server you can ssh into, and (b) set up a Makefile to run your static site generator and then call rsync—updating your site becomes as easy as typing `make sync`. the question is whether you have the comfort level to build and maintain that tooling. in this case i think “too much tech” is the wrong way to think about it—good tech makes your life easier, not harder—and it's the solutions for people who don't have much comfort with tech which are always both limiting and a hassle to work in (because they don't let you automate and optimize for the workflow which is best for you)
as far as price is concerned, i have an extremely small and boring linux server on Linode and it costs $5 USD/mo plus tax and requires negligible effort on my end. i think this is an appropriate ballpark price; it might be possible to go cheaper (but not much) and i would be wary of anything significantly more expensive
