For some background, I was previously using Squarespace to host an equivalent personal site. It started with the very good intentions of making (semi-)regular blog posts on whatever caught my interests and to also have a place serving as a portfolio / contact. Squarespace at the time fit the needs of my unjustified urgency to have something up and running, and just like that, I was a member.
Ignoring the fact that I barely, if at all, used the site, there were two major points that bothered me greatly. In particular:
- Paying $16/month for a very low traffic website
- Not having reliable backup
After some recent circumstantial changes, I finally found myself with much more time and decided to finally move off of Squarespace. I eventually settled on Hugo after some research as a nice solution to these problems.
Paying $0/month for a (insert here) traffic website
Initially I considered moving over to AWS S3 as it is a familiar part of my recent past, present, and (likely) near future. However what steered me away from this was the discovery of Github Pages which offers free static website hosting. Thankfully I RTFM’d as spending time on Hugo’s docs quickly pointed me in the direction of this hosting option.
In contrast to AWS S3, Github Pages offers free hosting for static websites. Given that I don’t expect things to be very high traffic, it at most it saves me literally “pennies” vs AWS S3 as I estimate the latter would have cost me something like a nickel a month. But then again I’m already I’m on a roll at cutting expenditures so why not just eek out the rest of the marginal returns right?
But seriously, what really reeled me in was that I’d already planned to use Git so it was just too convenient of a choice not to go with. As for the reason why I wanted to use Git, it was because it would serve as both a VCS and my potential backup.
Having a reliable backup
Using Git to keep track of my changes allows me to easily have a copy of all past states of my blog. If for some reason I impetuously decided to delete a bunch of posts or change my layouts dramatically only to regret it the next day, no problem. It’s as simple as reverting those changes to get back everything I want. So using Git (or any VCS), something I would be unable to do so using Squarespace, essentially allows me to have a backup of all publications of my website for any point in time.
I haven’t ignored AWS S3 completely as I store a compressed backup there. According to their FAQ:
which makes it really nice to have around either way even if I am not using it as a hosting service, and instead just as a compressed dump store instead.
Since the move I no longer have that nagging voice in my head about “that one” unnecessary expenditure. I also now have a very durable backup(s) of my site, so I rest much more at ease at knowing I likely won’t lose anything or be held hostage for this data.
For those interested, everything related to this blog can be found in these two repositories:
I warn you there isn’t really any documentation(at the time of this writing) but I do intent to add them. Feel free to use the theme if you’d like however I don’t have any plans to offer support or promises against breaking changes as I’m making changes to fit my needs as they arise.