Ask HN: If you were a grad student writing a blog, where would you host it?

16 hours ago

I'm looking for some input from the bloggers/blog enjoyers on this forum for what ya'll think is the best way to run a personal blog. I'm open to building it from scratch myself and self hosting on my residential network but I know that comes with some tradeoffs.

TL;DR: What is your advice for a new grad student launching a blog?

Are you asking for something that is low cost or free? as in a starving student. If so then probably NeoCities [1]. Some have used github but some do not like the idea that Microsoft control it.

[1] - https://neocities.org/

I would recommend creating a "cloud account" at a place like AWS or Hetzner or etc. Create an Ubuntu server or similar, install Spring Boot and begin serving your webpages to the world from an IP address. You can also bring in a domain name if you want to.

All told, it's probably $9 a month maximum, and will give you some very good skills and a large amount of freedom.