My new blog using Hugo

I recently made the switch from a

self-hosted Wordpress-powered blog website on a Docker VM in Microsoft Azure

to

a statically generated blog website using Hugo, hosted for free by Netlify.

The reasons for doing so are that Wordpress…

• had a long due PHP 5 to 7 upgrade that was giving me headaches (running Wordpress in docker didn’t help me much here because of the way it was set up)
• kept breaking once in a while mostly because plugins would fail or start behaving differently
• made me constantly worry about security, given its history of exploits
• required plugins and tweaks to get an A-rating on Pingdom tools

So after my employer started shuffling with the Azure subscriptions they offer their employees, I decided to go with a statically generated blog, generated by Hugo, which is:

• free to create and host (Netlify)
• easy and lightweight maintenance: change a markdown file in a github repository and it will automatically be deployed
• safer, because it requires no dynamic scripts on the webserver
• easier to set-up then a (self-hosted) Wordpress website, as it requires no database for example

Hardest part for me was picking a theme, but after evaluating lots of them I decided to go with Hurock.

Interested in doing this yourself? This excellent guide helps you set-up you Hugo powered website and host it for free using Netlify.

I took the time to migrate some of my old blog posts to this new blog, but am simply referring to the everlasting copy on "WayBackMachine" for the posts that I didn’t deem important enough.

Now I can spend the time it costed me to maintain a self-hosted Wordpress blog to actually writing some useful content 😄