Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

This is the part I'm struggling with. That's the view I held from 2016 - 2024. Practically though, it's only true if you want a leaflet website with 0 interactivity.

If you want _any_ interactivity at all (like, _any_ written data of any kind, even server or visitor logs) then you need a server or a 3rd party.

This means for 99% of personal websites with an SSG, you need a real server or a 3rd party service.

When SSGs first came around (2010 - 2015) compute was getting expensive, server sides were getting big and complex, bot traffic solutions were lame, and all the big tech companies started offering free static hosting because it was an easy free thing to offer.

Compare this to now, 2026, it's apparently nothing special to handle hackernews front page on free or cheap compute. Things like Deno, Bun, even Go and Python make writing quick, small, modern server sides so much quicker, easier and safer. Cloudflare and or crowdsec can cover 99% of bot and traffic issues. It's possible to get multiple free multiple GB compute instances now.

I didn't mean to imply there's some sinister plot of people maliciously encouraging people to use SSGs to steal their stuff, but that's the reality that modern personal webdev has sleepwalked into. SSGs were first sold to make things better performing and easier than things were at the time. Pretty much any "server anywhere" you own now will be able to run a handwritten server doing SSR markdown -> HTML now.

So why force yourself to have to start entertaining ideas like making your visitors download multiple megabyte client side index files to implement search, or embedded iframes and massive JS external libraries for things like comment sections? Easier looking SSG patterns like that typically break all the stuff required to keep the web open and equal, like screen readers, low bandwidth connections and privacy. (Obviously SSR doesn't implicity solve these, but many of these things were originally conceived with SSR in mind and so are naturally more compatible).

Ask anyone who's been in and out of web dev for more than 15 years to really critically think about SSGs in depth, and I think they'll conclude they offer a complete solution for maybe 1% of websites, but seem to be recommended in 99% of places as the only worthy way to do websites now. But when you pick it apart and try it, you end up in Jeff's position: statically rendered pages (the easy bit) and a TODO with a list of compromising options for basic interactivity. In 5 years time, he'll have complex SSG pipelines that's running almost 24/7, or a complex mesh of dependencies on external services that are constantly changing or trying to start charging him more to deal with his own creations.

I really hope I'm wrong.

Assuming 500 bytes of metadata + URL per blog post, a one megabyte index is enough for 2000 blog posts.

As already mentioned, you don't generate search result pages, because client side Javascript has been a thing for several decades already.

Your suggestion of converting markdown on every request also provides near zero value.

Writing a minimal server backend is also way easier if you separate it from the presentation part of the stack.

Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489563, it also seems like you fundamentally misunderstand the point. Interactivity is not the point. SSGs are used for publishing writing the same way PDF is used. Nobody sane thinks that they need a comment section in their PDFs.

That said, building your own static site and faffing with all the tech is generally an enjoyable distraction for most techies

I just assumed static website generators would be stable but well, there's always something that breaks. Terrible user experience for someone who just wants to use the generator to generate a website vs. to tinker with it as a hobby.

I'm in the process of porting my website to PHP ... but that project hasn't gone anywhere because currently everything works ;)

I totally see where you're coming from, but you just said it yourself, SSGs don't actually solve any problems for you right now that cloudflare doesn't. A site of Jeffgeerling.com scale is the archetypal scale site that _should_ benefit from SSGs, but Cloudflare is the easier, and arguably better, solution to the traffic/bot/scale problem.

If the problem you hit with Drupal is that it was more and less than you needed and became a headache to maintain, you will hit the same problem with Hugo eventually.

The solution to that problem is to just write your own server side that does what you need. It's so much more fun and rewarding, and I'm confident if you did it, the output would be better. With modern servers and server side technologies, you would most likely not have a problem running your minimal MD->html server on your current VPS behind Cloudflare.

Worst case scenario is you spend your time dealing with problems or misunderstandings with your own code, at least that'll be a refreshing change to dealing with problem or misunderstandings in Drupal's or Hugo's code or decisions.

There's a time and a place for SSGs, and geerlingengineering is the perfect use case, because it has no real interactivity. But - again, please take this from a place of candour than intended offence - from a user perspective, in the process of migrating Jeffgeerling.com to hugo, comments and search have been broken. Your migration to Hugo has just begun, you did the easy hugo part and created a post suggesting it was done. But the extra phases and tickets for comments and search suggest there's no obvious and easy answer on how to finish migrating interactive bits to an SSG.

Custom server side software is a complete solution, SSGs restrict what your complete solution can be without being one themselves. Nobody really seems to mention this until they move away from SSGs.

(Sorry for the bluntness again! Thanks again for your content, I stumble across your stuff all the time. I migrated my dad from a Windows XP machine to a Pi, and your resources are particularly useful and accessible for both of us!)