Costs to run this blog

Kev Quirk and Horst Gutmann recently wrote about how much it cost them to run their blogs. So I thought, I could write about it too.

Let’s start with a simple list of services I use for this blog:

Service | Monthly costs
Porkbun: Domain name ($ 22,09 per year) | < 2 €
Cloudflare: DNS | 0 €
Hetzner: Virtual Private Server | 2,96 €
BunnyCDN: CDN + Media Storage | < 0,10 €
Total | ~ 5 €

I registered the domain name jlelse.blog with Porkbun, because they are usually the cheapest register, but still support important features like DNSSEC. To compare prices between registers, I use TLD List.

For DNS hosting (and as a registrar of a few other domains) I use Cloudflare. They provide DNS hosting for free and also have an API, which I use with dnscontrol. I don’t use the proxy or CDN though.

To host the blog itself (and to host my website and a few other services as well), I use a VPS (smallest size) by Hetzner. So if I would only count the resources used for this blog, it would probably only be a fraction of the 3 €. I also have a second VPS at Hetzner, which I use for Gitea and Drone. But I also have a lot of other projects there, so I don’t include this here.

To cache the site on edge servers around the world and give readers a faster load time, I use BunnyCDN (I praise them high all the time). I also use BunnyCDN to store media files (photos, audio, etc.) for this blog. Since I do not have so much traffic and the page sizes are low, it is really cheap. I am still in an old plan without a monthly minimum of one dollar, but even that would be ridiculously cheap.

The software I use to generate this site is free. I use the open-source tool Hugo in combination with a few more self-developed tools to easily create new articles on the go, publish pictures and integrate IndieWeb and ActivityPub functionality.

Since the blog is my hobby, I do not count the amount of work. Blogging is fun for me and that’s what I like to spend my time for. But the fact that I only pay about 5 € per month for the blog shows that it is a rather cheap hobby compared to other activities.

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