Portfolio hosting cost breakdown cover

What I Actually Spend on Running mhassan.dev: $8/year

My portfolio costs me about $8/year. That’s the domain. Everything else is free. Here’s the full breakdown and the tradeoffs behind each choice. The Stack What Tool Cost Static site generator Hugo + PaperMod Free Hosting GitHub Pages Free Domain Porkbun (mhassan.dev) ~$8/year Analytics Umami (self-hosted) Free Comments Giscus Free SSL GitHub Pages auto-provision Free Why Hugo Over Next.js or Astro I tried Astro first. It was fine. But Hugo builds my entire site in under 200ms. Astro took 4 seconds. For a markdown blog with no client-side interactivity, that’s 4 seconds of complexity I don’t need. ...

February 15, 2025 · 2 min · Muhammad Hassan Raza

mhassan.dev — This Portfolio

This site runs on Hugo with the PaperMod theme, deployed to GitHub Pages via a single GitHub Actions workflow. Total infrastructure cost: one domain name. Why Hugo I wanted a static site generator that gets out of the way. Hugo builds the entire site in under 200ms, outputs plain HTML with no JavaScript runtime, and lets me write everything in Markdown. I tried Astro and Next.js first — both added complexity I didn’t need for a blog with no client-side interactivity. ...

February 10, 2025 · 2 min · Muhammad Hassan Raza