I’ve wanted to host a simple little website for many years now, but never had the inclination to invest too much (be it in terms of time, money or thought) into it - the obvious solution was to serve some kind of pre-baked static site, removing the need for any real kind of infrastructure maintenance, leaving me to worry about “content” (whatever that means).

I’ve gone through various systems in the past - trials and experimentation with most workflows including fully-hosted Wordpress; locally run static-site generators with the output synced to a traditional webhost; and even writing my own static site generator that was little more than glue around common libraries for parsing markdown.

I might not have seen anything through to completion with those, but I did at least start to form an understanding of what I was looking for, and I came up with the following list of requirements:

  • A static site, served consistently for all requests.
  • Requiring minimal maintenance and updating of the infrastructure.
  • Possible to host for minimal fixed costs given how little traffic this site will receive.
  • Able to use my own domain name to completely mask how the sites actually run.