Ask HN: Where do you host your personal blog these days?

I am a fairly unknown random person, and I get about 100 people a day to my personal blog, hosted on github pages. I don't promote it at all, it's mostly organic search results on whatever problem I've had to solve or solution I've discovered. I post once every few months.

Occasionally I get an email thanking me for a post, or correcting some error.

I'd say that largely depends upon the content. For the content in the original post, I'd generally agree that there isn't likely a huge audience. For some niche (often technical) topics/articles however, the content can be a very valuable resource to interested readers.

Additionally, writing blogs/or blog like articles on one's own site doesn't necessarily have to be directed at growing an audience. I personally think that adding some formality to writing (which might not exist in a diary) and publishing it can produce some useful notes for the author to reflect upon later. If nothing else writing short articles can serve as useful practice in writing down and expressing ideas. Of course there is still plenty to be said about the benefits of pen and paper which people do seem to overlook.

Why so pessimistic? Maybe when writing a blog you won't get more than a handful regular readers, but keeping it public stimulates you to talk about you, your job, and the solutions you got when encountered a problem (sure, you won't talk about how much you love your dog, I hope).

I'd also say that a well kept blog may be more important than a CV since you can actually tell how good you are in your job.

To answer the question: I used to blog with pelican, and now hugo.

Well not with that attitude.

I host an (unknown) personal blog on AWS running Django

Along these lines, I'm trying Github pages with Jekyll; works for me.

Static generators are what I'd recommend (my preferences are Hugo and Nikola) but instead of s3/cloudfront I use Netlify to deploy.

I've commented about Netlify before but they really are pretty great. The free tier is enough for a personal blog.

I've also used GitLab pages, but their integrated CI can be pretty slow (sometimes taking several hours to run) and I got frustrated with that, but they're a solid choice when not having those issues.

Pelican is great. I have it installed on a local vm which I use for composing then I push the static files to the webserver (ramnode). (www.adammelton.com)

This is a nice solution but if you have any readers that don't live near you, you may want to think about using Cloudflare for SSL termination. SSL can add unacceptably high latency to connection costs for people who are not in close proximity to your host. A typical HTTPS handshake using TLS requires 4 round trips assuming no packet loss. The Cloudflare CDN does a great job of making sure this penalty is reduced as much as possible by having edge nodes as close to as many users as possible. Just something to think about.

edit: You may even want to think about using something like netlify. The free tier is easily generous for all but the most popular personal blogs and if you outgrow it you probably will be able to make enough revenue to pay for better hosting anyways.

It's my understanding you can't deploy HTTPS on a github hosted Jeckyll site that's using - has that changed?

(To clarify: https:github.com/shitpostingblog, but https://shitbpostingblog.xyz is not)

Or if you are lazy, just github. https://github.com/divbit/blog

I can attest, Hugo is very fast. You might want to look into https://www.netlifycms.org/ (works with Hugo among others), and https://github.com/netlify/victor-hugo if you want to use Gulp/Webpack in your workflow.