My original server setup went down after an update gone wrong. (This is why you should stick with stable Linux releases for servers!) Yes, I could have easily fixed it myself. However, there were other factors that led me to rethink my entire setup.
My original website was hosted on a DigitalOcean VPS with a single CPU core and 500MB RAM. DigitalOcean won’t even let you use their automated Wordpress install with that configuration! The reason is that Wordpress requires a MySQL server, which sometimes does not perform well on less than 1GB of RAM. Through a workaround which involved getting a more expensive Wordpress VPS and downgrading it, I made it work anyway.
Wordpress worked well enough on my incredibly wimpy VPS, but used a huge chunk of the available resources. This was obviously the fault of MySQL. No surprises here. Considering that Wordpress is completely overkill for a simple blog and eats up resources, it didn’t make sense for me to continue using it.
After searching for alternative options for a while, I discovered Hugo. Instead of using databases to manage content, Hugo uses markdown files and generates static HTML from them. This meant I would be able to update my blog simply by creating some markdown files and pushing the generated pages to my server with Rsync. This sounded perfect to me, so I gave it a shot.
I’m not saying static pages are better than dynamic pages or vice versa. They have their places. Static pages are best for purely informational uses like blogs. Dynamic pages make more sense for things like online stores, which require constant updates and a level of server interaction that can’t be easily provided by static pages.
The page you’re reading right now was generated by Hugo. I have been using Hugo for around a year now. I have to say that it has been a great experience so far. If you are technical enough to use Hugo, I highly recommend it!