This Blog Costs $0 to Run — Here's the Exact Setup

In the previous post I promised practical notes on nomadic infrastructure. Let’s start with the most immediate piece of infrastructure a writer needs: a home on the internet that costs nothing, can’t be defaced by hackers, and survives the death of any single company.

That’s this website. It runs on three free services and a GitHub repository, and publishing a post is as easy as writing an email. Here’s the whole thing.

The stack

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┌─────────────┐     commit      ┌───────────────┐     build     ┌──────────────┐
│  Pages CMS  │ ──────────────▶ │  GitHub repo  │ ────────────▶ │ GitHub Pages │
│  (writing)  │                 │   (source)    │  (Actions CI) │   (hosting)  │
└─────────────┘                 └───────────────┘               └──────────────┘

• Hugo — a static site generator. It turns Markdown files into HTML, thousands of pages per second. No database, no PHP, nothing to hack. The Dream theme adds a masonry card layout, dark mode, and built-in search.
• GitHub Pages — free hosting for public repositories. Your site lives at username.github.io with HTTPS included.
• GitHub Actions — free CI. On every push, it installs Hugo, builds the site, and publishes the output. I never touch this; it just works.
• Pages CMS — the visual admin panel. A web editor that logs into your GitHub account and commits posts on your behalf, so day-to-day writing needs zero command line. It’s open source and can even be self-hosted.

The key property of this design: your content is just files in a Git repository. The editor, the generator, and the host are all replaceable. If Pages CMS disappeared tomorrow, I’d switch to any other Git-based CMS and keep writing. Compare that to WordPress, where your posts live in a MySQL database tied to a server you must patch, back up, and pay for.

How it was built

The whole setup took an afternoon, most of which was writing content, not configuration:

1. Create a repository named username.github.io — GitHub serves it as a personal site automatically.
2. Scaffold Hugo (hugo new site), add the Dream theme as a git submodule, and fill in one config file: title, author, theme options.
3. Add a GitHub Actions workflow that installs Hugo, builds with hugo --minify, and deploys public/ via the official Pages actions. The exact file is in this site’s repo.
4. Add .pages.yml — a small YAML file at the repo root that tells Pages CMS what a blog post looks like (title, date, draft flag, summary, tags, Markdown body). That’s what powers the “Add an entry” button in the admin panel.

From then on, publishing = log in to Pages CMS, write, click save. The CMS commits, Actions builds, Pages deploys. About one minute from “publish” to “live”.

Two pitfalls worth knowing

These cost me some debugging, so you get them for free:

1. GitHub hijacks the deployment mode. For username.github.io repositories, GitHub auto-enables its legacy deployment (serve the raw repository files) the moment you push. That silently overrides the workflow-based deployment, and the site 404s or shows raw Markdown. The fix: in the repo’s Settings → Pages, switch the source from “Deploy from a branch” to “GitHub Actions”, then re-run the workflow.

2. The CMS config filename is .pages.yml. Several tutorials floating around (including the one that inspired this setup — a post by Chinese blogger William Long) call it .pages.config.yml. That file is ignored, and the CMS greets you with “configuration file does not exist yet”. Also note the current schema uses input/output for the media directory, not path, and order: desc for list sorting.

The honest fine print

No setup is free of trade-offs, and a blog about honest infrastructure should list them:

• GitHub Pages limits: site must stay under 1 GB, soft limit of ~100 GB bandwidth/month, and builds are for public repos only. Plenty for text; a photo-heavy blog should compress images or use an image host.
• Publishing isn’t instant: ~1 minute of build time per post. Irrelevant for humans, but it’s not a database-backed CMS.
• Writing is Markdown: the CMS editor is comfortable, but if you want drag-and-drop page layouts (Elementor-style), this isn’t that.
• Comments and analytics are DIY: wire up something like giscus (GitHub Discussions as a comment section) or go comment-free, like this blog does for now.

What it adds up to

Total monthly cost: $0. Total attack surface: one static file server. Total lock-in: none. For a blog about building a location-independent life, a website that runs itself, owns its content in plain files, and bills nothing feels like the right first brick.

The full source of this site — configuration, CMS setup, and workflow — is public at bjachlxam/bjachlxam.github.io. Clone it, rename it, and the same stack is yours in an afternoon.