This site

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This site is setup using hugo and being stored at Gitlab, and then hosted using netlify. The guide I used is here, it’s an interesting read.

Advantages

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Infrastructure

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The cool thing about this setup is there is no infrastructure that you have to manage. Before this iteration of my site I had it hosted on a VM at GCP and used grav. Thanks to the always-free tier of GCP I didn’t pay anything, but I still had to manage the VM. Now I focus one the code that’s all stored in git.

No Backups

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Since all the code for this site is stored in git, I don’t have to keep backups. If something happens and the site goes down, I just git clone the repo to a new server and it’s up and running.

Deployments

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The deploysments using this setup is much easier as well. I just make all my changes in the develop branch, make sure they work locally using hugo server, push the develop branch up and test the deployment in develop on netlify. Then once I’m happy with my changes I open a PR and merge to master. Netlify then sees my new commit in master and automatically deploys the site.

Misc thoughts

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The nice thing about grav is that it might be a little more user friendly for non-tech users since it has an admin gui. Grav still uses markdown, which is a major thing I wanted, however it’s just a flat-file system CMS and therefore you can’t host as easily as you can a static site.

The guide I followed to setup this site did talk about using the Gitlab web IDE which could make the site easier for non-tech people, but you’d still have to explain a little to them about git, Gitlab, and the limitations of static sites. It’d be interesting to see a successful business that hosts sites using some type of static site generator.