New website with Hugo and Blowfish#
Some weeks ago I received a notification from my (now) previous hosting provider Contabo, that they will (again) increase the price for my rather low spec VPS starting from May 2026. Well, who doesn’t like a nice price increase without any improvements in the product, right? After a deep breath, I came to the conclusion that paying them €20 for that level of performance simply wasn’t worth it anymore.
Looking for better, still European alternatives, I checked the major hosters I could think of and stumbled upon a (new?) cheaper product from netcup: ARM64 VPS. Since most of my stuff is platform independent, I thought it would be a good idea to give it a try.
While migrating my services and data, I also wanted to improve some stuff that has fallen by the wayside so far. Obviously, hence this post, one of those was a new website, away from WordPress and the many, albeit mostly plugin related, security risks it brings with it.
After some evaluation I decided to go with Hugo and the stunning Blowfish theme.
In short; Hugo is an open-source static website generator, where the pages are defined in simple Markdown files. No more hassle with databases, PHP, updates or a publicly exposed backoffice.
And since the content is served statically through Nginx, the CPU and RAM usage is typically lower than with a dynamic CMS like WordPress.
To make things even better: Since all the content is stored in some Markdown files, one can simply store everything in a git repository, pack it in a rootless container image and deploy it using your preferred (obviously podman) containerization tool. You can even trigger deployments using via repository actions/workflows/pipelines or a simple WebHook.
On that note, I need to work on my CI/CD workflows…
