This article gives all information what I'm currently using to provide this blog to you.
| Part | Service / Program | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | GitHub | Free as in beer |
| Domain | namecheap | 86.35 EUR per 10 Years |
| HTTPS | Cloudflare | Free as in beer |
| Blog creation | Pelican | Free as in beer and speach |
| Writing | Sublime Text 3 | 70 US-Dollar (once) |
| Comments | Disqus | Free as in beer |
| Search | Tipue | Free as in beer and speach |
| Uptime monitoring | Pingdom | Free as in beer |
| HTML Validator | validator.w3.org | Free as in beer |
| Page analysis | nibbler | Free as in beer |
| Page speed analysis | gtmetrix, pagescoring, Chrome Developer Tools | Free as in beer |
| Accessibility | Wave | Free as in beer |
| Mobile Friendliness | Free as in beer | |
| API monitoring | runscope.com | Free as in beer |
| More Tests | uitest.com |
I've also used Google Analytics / Piwik some years ago, but I think it is not worth it. I don't want to spy my readers. And I would not change anything in my blog knowing who reads it.
Custom Domain
If you want to host your content at GitHub, but have a custom Domain
like martin-thoma.com instead of martinthoma.github.io, you
have to:
- Add an A-record to Github on namecheap (see example)
- Add a file called
CNAMEwith contentmartin-thoma.com(yes, withouthttp://) to the root of your directory
GitHub also offers some help on setting up a custom domain with Pages.
Cloudflare
Do this step after the custom domain works.
To set up HTTPS with namecheap and Cloudflare you have to go through the following steps:
On Cloudflare:
- Click on "Add Site" and enter your URL (e.g. "ml-ka.de")
- Click on "Begin Scan". This will take about 2 minutes. After that, click on "Continue".
- Click on "Continue" until they show you the nameservers. Write them down, you will need them for changes on namecheap.
On namecheap:
- Go to "Domain List", "Domains - Details", "Nameservers"
- Change it to "Custom" and "amy.ns.cloudflare.com" and "kai.ns.cloudflare.com"
- Click on the checkmark to make changes permanent. This might take up to 48 hours.