I wanted to run my own blog for quite some time now. However, I have been postponing this project for the most trivial reasons. One of these reason was finding hosting for the blog.

Why not GitHub Pages?

There are numerous free hosting options, and even more paid ones. Notably, there are GitHub Pages. Using GitHub myself on a regular basis, this seemed like the easiest solution. But why settle for easy?

GitHub Pages have a major downside to me. GitHub Pages are disabled for private repositories, unless you own GitHub Pro subscription. I did not want to have my blog repository public. I wanted to store drafts privately without the need to separate them from the rest of the blog.

Therefore, a search for an alternative begun.

Netlify

Having seen several “Deploy on Netlify” badges across various GitHub repositories I decided to see what this fuss is about.

Looking at Netlify pricing I saw a quite generous starter package. The starter package for an individual is free within certain limits - be it build time minutes, bandwidth transfer, or something else. However, I do not see myself surpassing any of the limits any time soon. And there was no need to have anything public!

I decided to give Netlify a go. Registered with GitHub and went on to setup my first site. It was a breeze. All I had to do was: giving permissions to my (private) GitHub repository, selecting deployment branch, and configuring basic build settings. And that was it! The site built and deployed shortly after.

Netlify: few days after

Since then I have been toying a little with Netlify settings. What I did not like so far was the file-based configuration. Having read the docs, I could not replicate the settings I have set through the web interface. Ultimately, I have decided that there is no benefit for me to using file-based configuration for the time being.

On the other hand, I found the DNS configuration quite good. I delegated my domain to be managed by Netlify. Then, adding aliases for the URL provided by Netlify (every site gets one) and creating a _redirects file was all it took. This allowed to redirect all traffic to the tymoteusz.makowski.page, even from the root domain!

Summary

There is not much to sum up here. You clearly can see the effect. I am happy to have the blog finally up and running. For now, Netlify for hosting it is!