I’ve recently made a big platform change for weirup.com and this site, transitioning from Dreamhost to GitHub Pages.

I had been a long-time customer of Dreamhost. I was very happy with their services and what they offered, and the shared services plan was pretty reasonable. However, at my next renewal, the cost was going to go up 50%. In itself I could probably justify it. However, I’ve been using less and less of the hosting for personal web projects. More recently, for small things, I’ve been using services like Heroku. Given that, I decided to end my DreamHost account and look at other offerings.

I was originally thinking about going with a VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean. But since I’ve moved my personal site to a static site generator (Hugo), those seemed a bit overkill. That insight eventually brought me to GitHub Pages. I was already managing my personal site via a GitHub repository, so it ended up being fairly simple to build the site and push the public directory to a separate repository. Additionally, the only other sections of the website were raw HTML/CSS, so those were easy as well to host on GitHub Pages.

There are quite a few online resources for hosting Hugo on GitHub. I found the official Hugo documentation just okay. This site worked the best for me, although I haven’t implemented the GitHub Actions automation just yet and I was able to get the GitHub Actions working after a bit of trial and error. I don’t love having 2 repositories for this (one for the site source and one for the generated site that is published via GitHub Pages), but it seems to work. Only big change was using “main” instead of “master” in git to meet current standards.

Likely more information to come, but this has been a fairly straightforward process to move my site. I’m hoping it also allows me to post a little more often 😁.