I had a small blog hosted with HostGator for the longest time, but when I was hit with a $350 USD bill I wondered why I bothered. I have a server on DigitalOcean anyway, so it makes sense to move this one over there too.
One concern I had though was about security. It’s not unusual to read about Wordpress exploits or security vulnerabilities, and I don’t want my little blog to become a security risk for other services I have running on my DigitalOcean box.
The answer was to look for static generators instead, where the whole site is embedded into the raw Html pages with no other server communication. Jekyll was the most popular software for this, and so far it has been a very pleasant suprise. Good themes are available online (such as this HPSTR theme!) and its otherwise very easy to work with. It also means my updates integrate into source control very nicely, whereas I never tracked things at all when using Wordpress.
I haven’t integrated any comments into the blog yet … but I’m thinking that might be a good thing :)
