I was so tired of constant plugin updates and endless WordFence warnings. I kept seeing blazing-fast websites and wondered — what kind of magic was that? That kicked off a long experiment with 11ty, Hugo, Ghost, and maybe even Substack.
Hugo
This journey lasted many months, and in the end I ended up with:
- Hugo + PaperMod
- Cloudflare Pages
- My WP fully migrated to Hugo, including redirects!
Great work! But why was I still not happy?
- No comments
- No emails
- No view counters
And the list of “NOs” just kept growing. I installed Remark42, but it didn’t send notifications. PaperMod had a lot of bugs…
A static blog is just so boring. Yes, you can patch it with external scripts, but is it really still a compact static site?
And what surprised me most — I didn’t want to write posts in Markdown anymore, because preparing images was such a hassle 🫢
Ghost
Next step: why not try self-hosted Ghost?
Set up a new VPS with Nginx, MySQL, Ghost CLI — and that’s it! In about an hour you have a beautiful, modern web engine up and running.
But why was I still not happy?
- No backups
- No private post comments (only for members)
- No media library: every time you upload the same picture, it’s treated as new, and if you delete it from a post, it still stays on the VPS
- No flexibility (no custom code): the only thing you can edit is your theme
- You can’t change the payment provider — only Stripe is allowed
- You can’t change the email provider — only Mailgun
Substack
Substack might be the simplest way to blog. You don’t have to worry about subscription fees or complicated setup. Just write — and you can be sure all your friends will get an email! For only $50 you can even connect your own domain.
If you don’t plan to make money through subscriptions, Substack has many advantages over both cloud-hosted and self-hosted Ghost. But yes, you still don’t control the code the way you do with WordPress.
WordPress
WordPress lets you bring almost any idea to life with even the cheapest VPS. But I understand that self-hosted WordPress can feel like an overwhelming task for a beginner.
I’ve worked with WP for about 5 years and know how to patch many of its holes. But if you don’t, it’s better to start with Substack or self-hosted Ghost and spend your time on creativity.
Why not just write on Facebook or another social platform?
I believe everyone should have one main platform for creativity, and use other services just for reposting. Your own website is the perfect foundation for it!