I'm starting a NonProfit Fediverse powered business called BT Free. I was thinking of making my homepage built on Ghost, but due to some of it's choices, I'm looking for something else.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a self hosted, possibly fediverse powered, software for creating a simple clean efficient business website landing page that explains who we are, what we're doing, etc. I am NOT a designer so something with templates or can hold my hand would be wildly helpful.

I was thinking maybe a static site generator maybe?

Anyone have ANY thoughts or suggestions? Remember there are no such things as bad ideas or comments!

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[–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Have used Jekyll, Hugo, and Docusaurus to generate static sites, and Wordpress and Ghost for blogs.

A few things to think about:

  • Where do you plan to host and how much is the monthly budget?
  • How much traffic do you expect to get?
  • Will the content be static or updated often (i.e. landing page site vs. blog).
  • Will more than one person be updating the site?
  • How technical is the person/people updating the site? Are they OK with using terminal and command-lines, or GUI and point and click.
  • Will there be 'member-only' features, i.e. things that require users creating an account and logging in?
  • Will you need to offer a way for people to get in touch? Like, contact pages, email, etc.
  • Will there be a need for public to post and answer questions (i.e. a forum).
  • Will you need future support for things like newsletters, shopping carts, etc.

If one-person, technical, static, I'd go with Jekyll and Github pages, or Jekyll/Hugo/Docusaurus on Cloudflare pages. They all have templates. But you need to know how to setup github repos and tools. Cost is $0 to operate, other than annual fee for custom DNS domain name.

If more than one person, non-technical, or dynamic, then hosted Wordpress or Ghost. Budget for DNS name and ~20-50 dollars or euros/month (plus or minus, depending on features and traffic). There are free versions of these, but they slap ads all over them.

You can self-host all these, but it's much easier to have someone else deal with traffic spikes.

If you need community forums or a way for users to communicate with each other, then none of the above.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago

    This is excellently well thought out post and some GREAT questions! I'll have to go through this more. I'm definitely planning on Self Hosting via Hetzner, I expect it to be static. I don't honestly expect much traffic, but who the hell knows. :-D I don't think I'll need forums as I have the Fediverse! :-D

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    If you're doing static sites, then traffic shouldn't be a concern.

    I host two sites that each get more than 2 million hits a month, and I run them from a $0.10 cent Scaleway server.

    Cloudflare in front of the sites takes most of the load.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    You're overpaying 😁

    Cloudflare static web hosting, including TLS/SSL, DDOS protection, WAF, and AI scraper protection, are all free: https://softwareonbudget.com/blog/how-to-host-static-website-for-free-with-cloudflare-pages/

    And if you connect it to github repo, it auto-updates on push to main.

    No connection. Just a happy user and a fan.

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