Before i started to write this blog for real, my biggest problem was "How am i supposed to host this without spending money i barely have?". Hosting itself was ironically not a problem, with GitHub Pages and other free options. But...there was the issue of getting a domain, and these (from what i have seen so far) ALL cost money, monthly!

And i also wanted to avoid using Wordpress, having ads to finance the hosting+domain, and the blog must be GDPR compliant.

I am not a cheapskate, but due to the problems in the job markets at the moment in Slovenia and Europe in general, everything is gettting more expensive and the need to conserve money becomes very important. Selfhosting was also a option, but i am again stuck with the domain problem, since finding someone with a dynamic IP (even a static IP) address is not exactly great.

And i happen to not be the only one trying this out.

How the blog is build and hosted

• It gets build using the Pelican static site generator from a collection of Markdown articles i write.
• The Pelican output (static webpages) is then deployed/pushed in a Git codeberg repository, when ready.
• The actual hosting is finally done using statichost, which fetches the webpages from the codeberg repository and deployes that as a static webpage, with a sane URL.

It's not much, and keep in mind that i use this blog non-commercially. Anyone with abit of Git and Pelican knowhow can make this work.

My thoughts to this hosting approach

To get a reliable free blog hosting option, with GDPR compliance...this, i think, is as good as it gets without things getting more complicated or making to many compromises.

Sure, GitHub Pages and similar can do the same thing, but this is simpler (atleast for me).

In the end, if your looking for a blog to host, this is one of several options to choose from.