Moving from managed hosting

RedXIV

Hey guys,

I'm asking here in case anyone has any advice while I'm looking into this.

I've currently got a few domains registered with Blacknight and a small hosting package which is primarily being used for the email inboxes as I've not got anything very active on the domains.

I used to have a blog on one running on wordpress which I enjoyed having but after a hack and a failed backup process, I left it for a while.

I'd like to go back to blogging a bit again but absolutely do not want to go back to wordpress. I was looking at Ghost or potentially Jekyll as I'd like something simpler and I can control a little better. However this is where I run into my dilemma.

Blacknight's shared hosting appears to only allow very controlled options for deployment. Static HTML files are the lowest level of control but I can't install any libraries or packages which I'd need for the likes of Ghost or Jekyll. I could potentially blog by adding HTML pages but since I need to add these via FTP through the control panel, it's a pain in the ass and I really want to streamline this.

So this is what I'm thinking options wise:

• Go with the static html pages which requires very little change from a hosting perspective but has a lot of overhead from a day to day perspective
• Move to VM like EC2 or similar to host so I get total control of the site - need to keep the email boxes still so need to pay for them still and with the hosting which could double my hosting costs (~45 in blacknight now, 10 for email and 80 for hosting with this option)
• move to cloud hosting with blacknight which keeps everything together but costs 155 a year.

While I'm still looking at this, I thought I'd ask in case anyone has suggestions or done similar in the past? my key asks are:

• Keep the email inboxes
• ideally git powered versioning & updates
• NOT WORDPRESS!
• cost effective - I'll pay for what I need, but not over the odds.
• The ability to ideally host multiple sites on the solution

Thanks all!
Red

deconduo

Outside of the email stuff, you can host static websites on AWS with S3 for almost no cost.

Talisman

Github Pages is powered by Jekyll. The content is hosted in a Github repository so you have versioning baked in.

14ned

You may find https://gohugo.io/ a better fit for your need than Jekyll. It has no plugins, hence they have to bundle more stuff in with the main binary, so you can get further than the others without plugins.

I have Hugo powering https://www.nedproductions.biz/ and https://ned14.github.io/outcome/ and I'm fairly happy with it. 100% static HTML, run on a cronjob so it appears to be dynamic. My only negative against it is that power customisation involves a steep learning curve, mainly to learn Go templating.

Niall

RedXIV

Thanks for the notes on this so far guys, really appreciate the input and I've been looking into the tools mentioned (I'll take a look at gohugo tonight )

I don't mind tinkering with something to get what I'm looking for but I'm cautious about diffing into a whole new language while I have a bunch of other commitments on the GO also (<- see what I did there)

But ultimately it looks like ye will save me money! Thanks guys!