Ask HN: What is your personal website setup?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5350591

by jbackus • 13 years ago

21 13 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm trying to reduce the friction in managing my personal website. That's includes everything from hosting services, to ssh & ftp clients, to content management tools.

What do you use and recommend? What are you using that you don't like and would like recommendations on better alternatives?

jbackus• 13 years ago

* I'm using a static template from theme forrest and Octopress[1] for my blogging software. I love Octopress so far and plan to go full Octo soon to make things simpler.

* I'm hosting with a VPS on Dreamhost[2] at $9.95/month which I find very expensive for such a completely mediocre service. I'm bothered by hosts trying to simplify the hosting process with endless panels and management tools that contort the hosting process into something more confusing instead of making it simpler. I've been using Heroku for projects and would like to use it for my personal site but I'm not sure if that is what Heroku was designed for really.

* I'm operating almost entirely from my OS X laptop now and FTP files to my server through FTPzilla. It works but every time I fire up FTPzilla I can't help but feel like there is an easier and smarter way to do all of this.

* I'm using Namecheap[3] for domains and like it mainly because using GoDaddy in the past has made anything better feel like a god send. A friend started managing a few domains with me on DNSimple[4] recently and I think its a great resource.

[1] http://octopress.org/

[2] http://dreamhost.com/

[3] http://www.namecheap.com/

[4] https://dnsimple.com/

fries• 13 years ago

I use blogofile [1], a Python tool that generates static HTML, running on a Linode which hosts a few other sites.

[1] http://blogofile.com/

minnixio• 13 years ago

I use Tumblr. http://codebeatsandpixels.com

Dilan• 13 years ago

Hey, I'm from a Sri Lankan family living abroad, was just wondering what the developer community is like over there?

onlyup• 13 years ago

Why do you have the font size so big?

nonamegiven• 13 years ago

Linode, nginx, uwsgi, django, postgresql. It's for a vanity site that no one reads, and one thing I like is that the whole stack hardly uses any resources when nothing's happening.

I do site admin with key based ssh/scp and nothing else. The key has a passphrase, and my Ubuntu desktop manages the passphrase nicely.

I don't like that I tried to leverage django's out of the box admin module too heavily; I should have written (or reused?) a small app for site management.

I'll be moving to a lightweight python framework, like bottle or flask, for the next incarnation. The framework will manage creation of static content (posts and comments) and everything will be served as static as much as possible.

harikrishnan83• 13 years ago

You may want to try github pages http://pages.github.com/.

rzvn• 13 years ago

Mine's backed up by webapp2 (App Engine). I use Zerigo for DNS. Will go with Flask for future deployments.

needcaffeine• 13 years ago

* Namecheap[1] for domain name

* Route 53[2] for DNS

* Jekyll[3] for managing content

* S3[4] for hosting

I do all my development on my Macbook Pro, with vim. Then I use s3cmd[5] to push the static files up to S3.

[1] http://www.namecheap.com/

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/route53/

[3] https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

[4] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

[5] http://s3tools.org/s3cmd

ZaneA• 13 years ago

Linode, Nginx, Jekyll, Git deployment using Gitolite.

Workflow to get a static site online:

  git clone pr0d:www/skeleton-jekyll
  cd skeleton-jekyll/jekylldocs
  [... add/edit files here ...]
  git add .
  git commit -m "Initial commit."
  git remote add example pr0d:www/example.com
  git push example master

At this point a hook builds the pages and sets up nginx using a template config (in the same repo), a few seconds later the site is live. Quick, easy, and can be done on any machine with Git and a text editor.

As for domains, I love http://iwantmyname.com

jlemoine• 13 years ago

It's really depends if my website contains only static or dynamic content.

If my website has only static content, I prefer to have a simple dedicated server on OVH[1] with Amazon CloudFront[2] as CDN. It is very cheap and provide a very service wordwide with the CDN. Amazon CloudFront is better than Amazon S3 for a worldwide scenario since your static files are always close to your users. Note that you must directly reference your Cloudfront instance in your DNS to avoid any SPOF.

When my website has some dynamic content, it is another story. I use Amazon RDS[3] as Database with a Multi-AZ Deployments. For the CPU I use different amazon EC2[4] instances in the region that provide the best latency for my users (in general us-east since I want good performances in North America and Europe). I then use Amazon CloudFront CDN[2] to deliver the static content of my website.

In any case, I use Route 53[5] as DNS.

[1] http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

[3] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

[4] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

[5] http://aws.amazon.com/route53/

garrickvanburen• 13 years ago

I recently moved all my personal and side project sites over to Linode.com . One box for WordPress/MediaWiki sites, one box for Ruby+CouchDB sites. Even though I'm still in the midst of replacing an SFTP habit with a combo of rsync & wget, I love it. Inexpensive to run and easy to do what I need to keep things running.

chuhnk• 13 years ago

ramnode.com 512mb vps super cheap, go http fileserver, static html, github repo.

Ask HN: What is your personal website setup?

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