Can someone help explain to me the appeal of static site generators? Functionally it's still a dynamically generated site, just that cache population/invalidation has turned into a user-controlled manual step. Is this because of people wanting to host on static-asset only servers (GitHub Pages, S3 Website, etc) or is there some other benefit above simply using any standard blogging software? If it's a question of spe…
It's simpler on the server as you say, you can serve the files from pretty much anywhere. You also need less resources to do so. I appreciate the cache idea, used to do it myself with wordpress, still do with MyBB, but it's imperfect and there are always misses, espceially if someone is actively cache busting you to DOS your site.
Much less hassle to setup. If you're going to do it 'properly' you're going to want to set up your dynamic site to run in a chroot jail, run the php process under a unique user per site (especially with nginx), setup unique database users and databases per site, secure your credentials, have a version control setup and update functionality and on and on. There's a lot to do. You can automate it (I have) but it's still annoying and requires monitoring.
You can move almost anywhere almost instantly, with just a git push/rsync and a DNS change.
Hugely reduced attack surface. It's literally a collection of text files.
The benefits are somewhat reduced if you get someone else to manage your hosting for you, but it remains simpler to move and usually cheaper to host as you need no database service.