Having moved my blog from WordPress to Hugo I now don’t need the LAMP hosting I’m currently paying for. It was time to do one of my most unfavourite things: deal with hosting.
I spent some time researching the options and it came down to the following hosting choices:
- Use GitHub pages, this made sense given it’s where my codebase sits
- Netlify, I see a lot of mention of them around and about
- DigitalOcean App Platform
- Stick with my current host as I’ve had no real problems there
I ruled out keeping my site where it is as that would mean breaking out the sFTP app to manually upload the public folder.
Next I tried GitHub pages, given I’d briefly looked at this for another project I felt this was where I’d end up and keeping everything under one roof appealed to me. I had quite a few issues though, using pages from a project repo means your baseURL needs to be githubdomain.com/
Having already got an account with them I moved on to DigitalOcean. They have a super useful guide on setting up Hugo and integrating with GitHub to build the site for you so you don’t even have to run hugo on your own computer. The one thing that worried me about switching away from WordPress was the lack of being able to edit my site from my mobile to fix the inevitable typo, this problem goes away as all I need is a Git client, which is arguably even easier to use on a small screen than fighting through WordPress' admin.
In the end DigitalOcean has worked so well I haven’t looked at Netlify. Probably the most stressful part of the move was moving the domain name whilst making sure not to break my email.