So, big sites want to know if other big sites are using it, as a benchmark for how good a fit it is. For really big sites, I guess Hugo is the only static site generator for the impatient – but, if you have decided that static is a good fit, I believe there are more important key benchmarks to consider when evaluating the risk of going with Hugo for your new site:
The lock-in will be minimal with any static site generator, compared to, say, the software driving the bank’s ledger system. If your are pretty sure, that may be plenty.
With Go’s static linked binary you’ll also get stability (and speed!) – if you version control your binary (maybe on a few different platforms to be really paranoid), you should be able to build the different versions of your your site for the next centuries …
Hugo is 0.14, but I will still consider it pretty stable – and will be even more so going for 1.0 – and is maintained by some very experienced developers (hey, even experienced developers make mistakes!).
I’m slightly biased – but if the “going static” is a decision already made: Hugo is as an obvious top alternative, even for big, commercial sites.
I was pleasantly surprised today to see that Cloudflare uses Hugo 0.32.2 for their developer documentation. (Their main site has no generator tag, and their blog uses Ghost.)
I went through their GitHub repositories but didn’t find the Hugo website source. Perhaps of interest to some here on the forum, I did find a Go tool to upload static websites: Stout (source). (Which seems to be inherited with their Eager acquisition.)
(Apologies if this bump is annoying, but thought it’s stil relevant today. Plus it will be cool to see if more big companies use Hugo.)
The Solus operating system also uses Hugo. I didn’t hear of them before, but they get $3k monthly through Patreon, so I’d consider them a ‘major’ site given how hard it is to get open source funding.
Datadog, a monitoring and analytics tool, also uses Hugo. I didn’t knew of them, but Alexa puts them within the 15,000 most popular sites of the world. And they got almost $180M in funding, so if that isn’t major I don’t know what is.
Ultrasurfing.com, a news website, also uses Hugo. I’m not sure what to make of this site, with their heavy use of ads and no ‘about us’ and company information. But Alexa says they belong to the 5,500 biggest sites in the world, and are almost in the top 1,000 for the US.
Genbook, an online scheduling and booking software, uses Hugo too. They aren’t major according to Alexa with a global rank of 36k, but with 10+ years in business and millions in funding they’re a professional player nonetheless.
The Kubernetes project website uses Hugo. This is a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Website sources are located here.
