When I transitioned my blog to a virtual server many years ago, it worked adequately with the version of Wordpress and MySQL that I used. Over the years, Wordpress and MySQL required more and more resources to run. I didn’t really want to upgrade my virtual server for a hobby, so I kept tweaking the settings to ensure that the server would still run. Unfortunately the server started having more and more problems over the years from running out of memory to increased load that took the server down.

After one too many alerts of the server failing to respond, I decided to convert my blog to a static site using Jekyll. It was pretty easy to setup on my Mac and then deploy it to my server. There are a bunch of options for static blogs; Jekyll seemed like the simplest to get configured and get running.

Pros

  • Reduced server load
  • Reduced server memory usage
  • Faster load time on pages
  • Simplified maintenance
  • Reduced surface to attack by hackers (no MySQL, no php, etc.)

Cons

  • Search is a little hacky using some JavaScript I found that searches an HTML page with every entry in it!
  • Site has to be regenerated to deploy.
  • Since I have it setup on my Mac, I can’t post without using my Mac.
  • I have to synchronize the built site to my server using rsync.
  • Comments can’t be added except manually (unless I integrate a third party site).

Summary

I probably should have converted my site a long time ago to reduce my frustration with having to maintain it. While the blog may not look as good as it used it and lacks many features of Wordpress, I think this was a good move as I’m trying to simplify working on servers and networking.