The Cost of Blogging

Re:The Cost of Blogging by dogline on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:56PM (#50385040)

  - Get domain ($20/year)
  - Get a cheap compute instance (free or $5/month)
  - Tell claude to install nginx and otherwise setup instance
  - Tell claude to set DNS(s) to this instance, and modify nginx.conf
  - Tell claude to setup a Hugo static site local on your computer
  - Add a post in markdown, or tell claude to make one for you
  - Tell claude to setup Hugo to make a template that's unique to you
  - Tell claude to make shell script to build Hugo and rsync to remote host

If you stick to static pages, you can host many domains with Hacker News traffic and the compute instance won't break a sweat. https://www.orner.com/projects/

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by als0 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:04PM (#50385132)

Soon you’ll “Tell claude” to write your posts

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by lotsofpulp on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:28PM (#50385401)

I was waiting for that punchline.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by jraph on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:50PM (#50385658)

You wanted to make a humoristic slippery slope effect, but I'm afraid they pulled the rug out from under you and actually suggested just that.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by soupfordummies on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:04PM (#50385136)

where do you get free compute? (serious)

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by dogline on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:08PM (#50385184)

Oracle use to offer a free compute instance in their cloud offerings. Still does, but people fight when they become available, and will write scripts to watch for them. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Digital Ocean has cheap servers too. AWS is always there, but costs more. You don't need much.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by caminanteblanco on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:30PM (#50385420)

I mean if you switch to pay as you go you can get an Ampere server for free, with no wait. The wait is just for the always free tier. It's a $100 hold, but oracle's never charged me a dime. It is an insane deal, I'll never understand giving away 200gb of disk, 24gb or ram, and 4vcpus for free

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by dghlsakjg on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:36PM (#50385488)

They lowered the ram allowance. You might be paying for that now if you have the full 24gb provisioned

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by browningstreet on Thursday November 05, 2026 @06:35PM (#50386134)

I lowered my RAM allocation on my Oracle Ampere server and it runs my Hermes Agent just fine. But yes, to get the free ampere server I had to put in a credit card for possible billing. But I've never been billed.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by Bender on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:17PM (#50385275)

I did something similar. I had Claude fork an anonymous image board, add features to it, fix bugs in it, optimize it, add the ability to import (convert) HTML to the boards markup language and then I moved most of my blog posts to it.

It's not exactly a traditional blog, nor is it a traditional image board. Replies may not get through real time but if they are thought out and do not break US laws then it is likely they will end up on the site which I think is still a little better than some blogs. It's not for everyone. Well, its probably not for anyone other than me. My emphasis to Claude and Grok was to ensure it does not require JavaScript and makes a best effort to be WCAG compliant and respect peoples motion sensitivity preferences even if I never hire someone to certify it.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by darkamaul on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:36PM (#50385494)

I would also recommend hosting your blog content on GitHub and deploy using GitHub Actions. They’re free for open source projects.

And simply use Cloudflare generous free tier to host your website and protect it from ddos.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by krapp on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:48PM (#50386735)

Note that it's possible to use Git to publish to any server, it doesn't have to be Github. I use it on my blog that's just a shared account on asmallorange.

If your static site generator (I use Nikola) has a config for publishing to Github it will probably work with any remote origin.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by dogline on Thursday November 05, 2026 @06:40PM (#50386175)

So, this post went up several points, had several people respond, then sunk back down to one point. People downvoted it, because it explained how to host something yourself? I don’t understand downvotes.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by ozim on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:15PM (#50386467)

People downvote stuff they disagree with, not “stuff that objectively is wrong”.

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Re:The Cost of Blogging by krapp on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:44PM (#50386710)

Ignore everything after your second point, you don't need Claude for any of this.

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