The other week I received an email from my hosting provider saying my website was due for renewal.

That was fine until I saw the price.

They wanted a little over £600 to host a personal blog. The site gets maybe 100 views a month on a good day. Paying that much to host a handful of static pages felt unreasonable.

So I started looking for alternatives.

WordPress is free, but running it is not. It needs PHP, a database, and a fair amount of server resources. It brings a lot of features, but most of them are irrelevant for a simple blog. I realised I was paying for flexibility I did not need.

That led me to static site generators.

A static site generator takes Markdown files, a theme, and a config file, and turns them into plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There is no database and nothing to render at runtime. The output is just files.

Once the site is built, the problem becomes very simple. You need somewhere to store the source, and somewhere to host the result.

The source lives in a Git repository. That gives me history, backups, and an easy way to edit from anywhere.

Hosting the generated files was less obvious.

GitHub Pages works, but it requires the repository to be public unless you pay. I did not like the idea of my personal blog being forkable by default.

Cloudflare Pages turned out to be the missing piece. It lets you deploy static sites directly from a private repository, and it costs nothing for a site this small.

The last issue was images.

Putting images in a Git repository is a bad idea. Instead, I store them in a Backblaze B2 object store. On its own, B2 charges for reads, but Cloudflare can sit in front of it and cache everything. In practice, that means the cost is negligible.

The end result is a faster site, a simpler setup, and far lower costs.

What used to cost around £150 a year now costs about £1 or £2.

For a personal blog, that feels like the right trade.