Ask IH: what do you use for your startup blog?

Multiple self-hosted Ghost instances on a Raspberry PI, with traefik, portainer, and dbsnapper (to backup the databases to Cloudflare R2)

From an SEO perspective, if your blog is aimed at building an audience around and for your product then I would 100% advocate for having your blog on the same domain as your website.

Having content on a separate domain does nothing for you SEO-wise, and I see far too many websites have a ton of great content hosted on a personal blog when it really belongs with their project's website.

If your blog is more about building in public/your personal journey, then this opens up more options like:

• Substack
• Medium
• Ghost
• Github pages

Ultimately it depends on what you want out of your blog and publishing experience.

Personally, I don't worry about owning data and self-hosting, I just care about ease of use and the ability to publish. As a result, I have my website (and my website's blog) on Webflow , and I have my personal blog on Ghost. I've built websites on SquareSpace and WordPress to familiarize myself with the platforms as I provide SEO coaching and have clients who use these platforms.

GitHub Pages + Jekyll + Giscus (for comments)

We have a lot of indie hackers using Versoly for their marketing site and blog.

By using 1 tool you get better SEO, the colors/font match and you can add more content such as a changelog or knowledge base all from one platform.

Let me know what you end up chosing and why. Would be very helpful.

@wseorci,
Ghost is definitely the best option, you can self-host it, which is quite cheap. If you are not too technical, you can also find some managed ghost cms Hosting for 19$ per month.
For your Data,
the point with ghost is that no matter where you host it, you will always be able to export your posts in .json file and your members in .csv which allows you to always keep your content.

Seo Wise,
What i like is that it is already optimized for SEO. Everything is provided, so it generates the sitemap, no need to deal with the meta data and it is really fast. You will just have to focus on your content, and you should rank high on Google quite quick.

I usually go for WordPress, most times using the JSON API. And if you can couple that with Next.js' getStaticData, it's blazing fast! I do this because everyone's familiar with WordPress so there's almost no learning curve and I also know my way around it.

Also, hosting a WordPress server is pretty cheap, you can get 2$/month solutions.

I just created https://securely.so/resources with the ghost content api and next.js. All of the pages are statically compiled so it’s great for seo. And it’s really a joy working with ghost.

If you’re using tailwind it’s super easy to style the copy with the prose class in the typography extension. Good luck 👍

i use astro for findcool.tools

i personally use markdown, but they have integrations with other cms providers that would make it pretty simple for a non-technical person to jump in and manage imo.

you might find Ghost to be the most balanced option. It's open-source, user-friendly, and allows for easy data portability. You can start with their hosted service and easily switch to self-hosting when you're ready. It offers the simplicity of Wordpress without the limitations on data ownership, making it a good fit for startups and non-technical team members.

My blogging stack is focused on speed. I want to write as fast as possible and all the tools that I used is either I am familiar with or it provide speed.

1. Markdown Next js ( I am familiar with this and easier for me to do it in markdown )

2. Vercel ( just need to setup once and rarely fail , easy deployment )

3. Creativeblogtopic.com ( For automated seo research to give me the best topic and keywords to rank higher on search )

4. ChatGPT ( For checking grammars and sentence structure )

5. Pexels ( free high quality picture and video )

Here is my overall stack and for now I am use google analytic and vercel analytic to track the data.

I used Astro + Vercel to build a website for my product - rivalhunt.co. It was honestly a great experience since there are a lot of ready templates for Astro. It's also pretty easy to deploy everything using Vercel (literally just connect your git repo and you're live). Since astro is a static site generator, it provides nice SEO and page optimizations out of the box so you don't have to worry about that later on.

You can also combine it with some headless CMS if you're looking for a solution that can be used by a non-tech person. The idea is that you can still have any website setup you want, but all the content is managed via some nice UI with zero technical knowledge required. Here is a list of some of the most popular ones: jamstack.org/headless-cms/

Hey there, fellow indie hacker here.
For this exact case you are mentioning, I've built WPJack.com

It will manage all your WordPress cloud servers and sites, and it works with Linode, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, and Vultr.
You can get a 4 euros instance on Hetzner and install an unlimited number of WordPress sites on them and manage with WPjack.

Regarding WordPress themes, I recently discovered OllieWP; it's a super nice theme with support for the native WP page builder. It does not require any plugins to work, and the best part is that it looks exactly like a demo when I create new pages from the templates provided.

Why do you believe you don't own your data on WordPress.com , or WordPress hosted elsewhere? There is a simple export function, and all your content can be imported to another WordPress host, ghost and many other blog solutions.

I just built my own blogging system in Rails and I copy paste them into new projects. I also wrote a small how-to for myself so I can quickly set it up.

@Wiktor,

I've been reflecting on various platforms for blogging and content creation, and here are my thoughts:

Medium:

My main gripe with Medium is the ownership aspect. I'm a firm believer in "you write it, you own it." It irks me that even after contributing to the platform, I might have to pay to access other contributors' content.

CMS (like WordPress or Ghost):

Both are commendable options, but I have a few reservations:

• The backup and update process can be a hassle. I'd rather not stress about potentially losing content during CMS updates.
• On the brighter side, I love markdown. Ghost, in particular, shines here. Writing in markdown and then deciding to publish is a seamless experience.

Static HTML Hosting:

• Hosting on S3 is also fantastic and cost-effective option.
  You could potentially build a static page with html css or some client side framework and publish a static page, and this can be done fairly cheap.
• But, integrating features like comments and a "contact us" form can be challenging, and when you are a technical writer you don't want to write your own backend for writing articles (It's ironic, i know),
• Again, my love for markdown comes into play. I wish to write in markdown, and I don't want to write blogs/articles in html but markdown.

What I've Been Experimenting With:

• I write in markdown, accompany it with a JSON file for metadata (e.g., page type, blog, main page, etc.), and maintain an artifacts folder.
• I then publish these articles on git.
• I'm busy creating a docker container points to this public repository. When spun up, it reads all markdown and JSON files, building a site with an endpoint containing the data.
• I've also linked another container, Mailrise, for notifications. (Mailrise has a bunch of awesome notification endpoints that you can easily configure to get notifications)

So basically,
You write the article in markdown publish to git and restart container and you are done.

If this piques anyone's interest or if you have suggestions to refine this process, please reach out. I'd appreciate any insights or collaboration! I would also be interested in showcasing the current state of the project and gettings some insights. :)

Cloudflare Pages + 11ty

I find 11ty more flexible than Jekyll, and using Cloudflare also provides more options than GitHub Pages. (only used the free plan)

My site is on wordpress so I just do it there. Never thought of any other option. Is there a reason why you wouldn't just do it on your site? Not criticism, genuinely curious

easy:

https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog

I use self-hosted Ghost for EarlyBird and HeyForm. It works perfectly and provides a great writing experience. Think of it as a lightweight alternative to WordPress, with a strong focus on content creation.

I have used WordPress for both business website, blog and documentation. It work well without any hassle

Github pages w/ Jekyll. Free, fast, simple.