Migrating from Ghost to Hugo
It’s been some time since I have posted anything (I recently became a father, so I spend most of my free time with the 👶) and for the past few months (about 5 months), my blog has been down.
I’ve noticed some time in November that my blog was throwing a 500 and I just spent maybe 5 minutes to check the logs on the VM where it was running (GCP) to see why. Everything seemed ok (nginx was up and ghost showed no issues either).
So I thought to myself: “well, it’s probably gonna take some time to investigate wtf is going on and I don’t have time right now, I’m gonna do it maybe next week.” So I just stopped the instance so it doesn’t incur cost. And here we are, 5 months later and I still didn’t take the time to investigate the issue 😆
During that time I also found Hugo - I was looking for an easy way to write some docs for some work related stuff - and I said to myself: “if I can run this for free and I cannot find out why ghost doesn’t work, I’ll switch to this”.
I know, it just sounds cheap and lazy. But cheap is good in some cases, especially when it comes to running things on the web (or in the ☁️). And so is lazy, if some tool can do things faster and easier, I will almost always go for that option.
So first I just wanted to see if I can restore my current blog. The first thing I tried was bumping the resources, since ghost requires at least 1GB of memory and I was using a E2 instance - e2-micro which had 1GB mem, but only 0.25 cores - because it was cheaper to run. And after bumping to a N2 with 4GB of mem, ghost was back online! So that was about all the investigation I had to do 😆
This was great. But the cost for running that also would have increased from $30 USD/month to about $40 USD/month (that includes storage, networking, VM, etc). And while the sum is small, I definitely didn’t want to pay for it if there was an alternative which I could run for free! It also didn’t make sense that a small blog would need so many resources to run 🤯
So I decided to try out Hugo, with the DoIt theme, to see how it works and if I like it. So I spent about half a day just testing it out and setting up a blog with a couple of posts. It was easy! Everything from config, theming, running and adding new content was just straightforward. Then I spent the rest of the day porting all the content from the ghost blog (manually going through each post) to the new platform, hugo. I was trivial, but boring 😆 . But still worth it!
For hosting, I went with netlify, because there’s 0 cost to running a static website (at least at the traffic I’m getting). You can even add a custom domain (with SSL - they use letsencrypt) at no cost. And the content is on Github - also for free. So I ended up with 100% reduction in cost to run my blog 🎉
So my thoughts so far on Hugo are:
- It’s easy to get started with their quick start guide
- The docs are comprehensive
- The community is large, so it’s easy to get help (though, I had no issues at all, yet)
- There’s a decent amount of options for deployments and they provide docs for those as well; it’s a static site, so deployments are also easy
- The resulted site is fast to load in browsers
- Build times are fast
- It’s extensible via go modules
- There’s tons of themes to pick from
But don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and try it out yourself!
