Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS. All I do now is write a new article in Markdown every now and then, then run a simple shell script to regenerate the site and rsync the newly minted static pages to the server.
Personal sites or new blogs are all too often victims of premature optimisation - your amazing google PageSpeed score is nice, but who cares if no one is reading.
Why didn't you host on Github Pages and you could have saved all that but having the same flexibilty regarding a SSG use case?
I believe the last time I checked the TOS, no such mention was made for Github pages.
What kind of website were you hosting?
Tried that once, fell down a 3 day rabbit hole trying all the static blog generators.. ended up picking WordPress.
After trying Lektor (fine for general use, but hard to theme; no pre-baked templating/theming system at all) and Hugo (tbh I don't remember the exact thing here, but I got really frustrated trying to do something and ended up deciding that themeless Lektor was better), I'm now holding out hope that Ghost, while not a SSG, will be good and simple enough that I can self-host a "blog" without falling back to raw HTML editing or WordPress. Started out by having to edit the package dependencies to versions that work on recent versions of Node... :\
I'm still falling through the very same hole. What made you pick WordPress?
Essentially it was the default option
That seems to have stopped me from writing though.
Oddly enough it was the opposite of that for me. Each of the static site generators I looked at were non-PHP (which is fine but I lack the experience)
I tell you what, if someone ever had a gun to my head and said "make this Ruby software work first time without errors" they might as well just pull the trigger
Unless you're pulling a lot of traffic this isn't necessary
Given the barrier to doing this is virtually non-existent (it's a handful of clicks on the CloudFlare dashboard), seems silly not to take advantage.
I have a long list of attempts at setting up my own site, but because it's mine I wanted to get it just right. And so down the rabbit hole I go: making sure my server is super-secure (because it's important hey I'll learn in the process!), finally trying out Caddy, using Ghost (node.js), building my own static site generator using React for the backend, which of course means updating and perfecting my Ultimate Front-End Setup.
And once that's done, I want to do right by the design, and of course make sure my html/css/js is impeccable and that it all runs on every browser under the sun.
Of course I love doing this and I learn a lot from it, but if my goal is to write stuff and put it online, this approach never really works. I'm happy it doesn't, because it means I still love what I do more than writing about what I do, but it's one very legitimate reason to use something like Medium.