Hosting your Web Site

Everyone how wants to start a blog, or personal web site, has something to tell. These days it is easy. But getting a lot of readers is hard. In order for the web site to be successfull the writers must also have a clear idea of who is the intended audience. You want to deliver the message in a best possible way.

How and where to put the web site is the first step for setting up a site. This is a very technical decision. It is hard to find on the best system, and it does not help your audience at all. It needs to be done before writing.

If you are a big company you can hire developers and start programming a web site with a programming language and a web framework. That approach gives flexibility to build any web site and any feature. This also gives a developer a full time job, and is expensive.

Today you should concider using one of many Content Management Systems. Those are often abbriviated CMS. wix, Squarespace are two Cloud based examples. There are on premise alternatives. Wordpress is the most popular one. Running a site on a CMS is not free, but it saves you the development and is worth the money.

CMSes gives you a web interface where you edit your content and publish. No servers to manage, code to write. As a software engineer I find CMSes flat out boring.

The technical middle ground programming a web framework and a CMS is the static site generator. Static site generators are programs that use text input files to generate static web pages. The individual pages after most often written in markdown files, and the system converts it to static web pages. Unlike pages built with web frameworks a static site generator web server does not need to run programming languages on the server. This is great. It makes the pages compatiable with any web server.

Static web pages is good for IT-security also. Without a running programming language on the server a wide range of cyber attacks disappears completely (Remote Code Execution). Static web pages requires few server resources (CPU and memory), and they load balance and they are perfect for web caches. All this makes them harder to attack with a (DoS).

Both CMSes and static code generators let’s you, the site owner, focus on what is most important. With less time spent coding you can find more time to writing web site content. I can not stress that enough.

As I mentioned hosting web sites is easy. For static web pages I would recommend Azure Static Web Apps. At least if you are starting a new static site generator based project today. It is increadibly cheap. Much cheaper than Azure Web Apps. Also they scales to tens of thousands of users.

Myself I am serving this web site on Apache web server on an Mac Pro 1.1. This machine is really vintage Running anything at all on this machine in year 2023 is a challenge. How I am serving this web site today is a topic for the next post.