Creating My First Blog

I want a blog, but I don’t want to spend more than $30 yearly.

Why am I starting the blog then?

I started this blog to achieve two goals.

• The first is to improve my language skill. Reading and listening are easy for me, but when I must write or speak - well, it is a mess in my head.
• The second one is to overcome my introvert personality. Usually, I am not the kind of person who wants to talk or share with others.

So, why the budget is so low?

I have experience as a web developer, but non as a blogger. Naturally, when starting something new, I don’t want to risk too much. This is the reason I have been searching for the cheapest solution for the blog. Usually, it needs a domain, hosting, and WordPress. Shared hostings are not that expensive, but they have their limitation. WordPress offers almost the same.

Lucky for me, I have been working with some of the Google products, and I know that the Firebase has a free plan, and it is suitable for most cases, including mine. They offer 10GB of storage, 10GB/month traffic, and custom domain with SSL.

Wow, that is great.
Now the only thing I need is a domain, which I already bought from namecheap.com, and this is how I got a domain and hosting for around $20 and under half an hour.

If anyone has ever used a Firebase, he will know that you can only upload a static content(images|html|javascript|css|etc). This is good since 99.9% of the human population of the earth uses the web UI and not reading the raw HTTP response. The “bad” part of this scenario is that you cannot have backend services.

Typically every blog needs a CMS(Content management system) to be able to create and modify its content. But this is yet another thing that I don’t want to spend time on. And because I am the only one who will create posts for the blog, I figured out that I can use my IDE to write my content. I use an MD(markdown) type of file, and for now, it seems to be a great solution.

The first idea was to use almost everything of google firebase tools:

• Hosting for host the blog
• Storage to use for storing the gallery of the posts
• Database to store all the posts

But after testing the speed of every service, I found that Firebase Storage has a delay of at least 200ms for an image, and the bundle size is somewhat bigger if I use the database.

Currently, I use only the Storage tool, but if the blog starts to grow, I will going to use the database tool again.

To summarize: I bought a domain -> register at Firebase -> use only Hosting -> create simple React App with Material UI -> Blog page under $30.

 
Firebase / NameCheap / React