Tooling and Hosting options research
At IndieWebCamp, we collected an overview of everyone’s publishing software tools and hosting providers. And tonight I am doing a bit of research. I’m a little overwhelmed by only going through all those options. Of course, there’s an almost infinite amount of additional options out there, too.
Anyhow, to help narrowing it all down, I thought I’d write down some of my current thoughts on what I might want from both my future publishing tool and workflow for this blog, as well as the hosting options. Here we go:
Tooling
- I’d like the software to spit out a static site in the end. This makes it more easily portable and hostable – even when I myself can’t any longer. It’s much simpler to copy a simple folder and host that somewhere, than being required to run a certain software and database in order to build the site.
- An obvious choice here are Static Site Generators (SSGs).
- The downsides of using those and deploying something static, is that I won’t have dynamic features like – for example – search, comments or Webmentions. Or at least I would need an additional external service for that, since the site wouldn’t be able to accept any data to be put into it.
- If I end up bending over backwards to make those things work with an SSG, wouldn’t it be better to simply use something dynamic like a CMS? Then I’d have all the freedom. Plus, I would probably have a form via which I could post to the site.
- And posting to my site via a web form is a must, to be honest. I want to be able to post from multiple devices. And be able to upload files (mostly images I guess), too. Being able to do so only via a non-mobile device would be a show-stopper, I think.
- There’s an option, though to use something like Netlify CMS on top of an SSG to have an SPA admin interface that adds content directly to my git repository. Certainly an interesting option.
- A way to import my Tumblr blog would be really handy.
- And a way to redirect those old URLs would make sense, too.
- If I go with a CMS, it’d be nice to not rely on a database. I get a little uneasy relying on something so complex as a database. It’s simply easier to read plain text files than it is to get stuff out of a DB again. And I feel using a database is not really necessary for a blog.
- Should be something I would want to use in the long run.
Hosting
- I’d like to manage as little of the tech as possible and is feasible. For example, I feel like managing a VPS is a little too much. Shared webspace might do the job. Or even simple static hosting.
- The servers should probably be located in Germany.
- Preferably a focus on being environmentally friendly, too.
- I favour large storage space over high performance (because I don’t think I have high demands).
- Free or almost free SSL certificates, including wildcard certificates. Probably should offer the Let’s Encrypt ones.
- If possible, use one provider for all projects.
Phew. And that’s just some of the things I‘m considering. Running a risk of overthinking this and never get anything done. I feel this is important, though. Especially to choice for the software.