New to Hugo

Hello All,

We currently manage a “Brochure” website for a client; a simple site with information about the client, where they are and what services they offer etc, and are looking to move away from our current setup; WordPress (sits on a Digital Ocean droplet on the complete LAMP stack). The main reason we are moving away is because of security and stability issues.

A few questions;

Where’s the ideal place for hosting such site?
Is using a VPS like DigitalOcean an overkill?
Do we need a complete LAMP Stack?
Do we use Apache to host the site or is Hugo’s in-built webserver production ready?

Things to consider; The clients long-term goals are to host some audio lectures and post a regular blog post (nothing fancy).

Thanks for any suggestions.

  1. “Ideal” is subjective. Netlify is great and powerful, but can be pricey if you go beyond the “free option”. Amazon S3 is a cheap alternative but is a little harder to manage, esp. to set up HTTPS, CDN, automatic deployment etc. Other good options would be Google (I think they have done stuff to simplify the setup for static sites lately)…?
  2. VPS/Digital Ocen is overkill if you only need the static part (serve Hugo files). It may also be an underkill if you take the benefits of CDN into account.
  3. LAMP stack or similar only if you need some server side/dynamic stuff, which lives outside of Hugo. Also see Netlify’s recent announcement on running “serverside functions”.
  4. You would want to have Apache or similar – but this comes out-of-the box if you follow my recommendation in 1).
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If you want cheap, then many use netifly free option.

However, you mention you want to move away from digital ocean for security \ stability issues. I highly recommend moss.sh who have a static setup for both digital ocean and vultr (currently using both services) and moss.sh will update your servers with all the latest security fixes, and they are one of the only automated server management services that have a static only option (no mysql \ php installed) to make it extra secure. It only costs $15, and if you are managing lots of clients you might find this extremely time \ cost efficient.

I use a full Nginx setup with moss.sh.

3 Likes

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for your advice, I’d like to clarify that we would like to move away from WordPress because of it’s security issues, not Digital Ocean.

Thanks for your recommendation, we will look into Moss.sh.

Hi Bep,

Thanks for your suggestions, we greatly appreciate them. We will look into AWS and Google’s Cloud offering.

Kind Regards

I just want to add that Netlify is built on top of AWS services. The great thing about them is the “packaging” they have done all the tools on top of it. It is very easy to use, but it may be better economy to spend some effort creating the “packaging” yourself, if you don’t need it as streemlined.

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Thanks again. We are going to test out the site using Netlify.

1 Like