Recently a friend of mine, a professional consultant in cyber security, asked me how he could put up a website for his consultancy. It didn’t need to be fancy but it did need to be low cost and easy. My answer was simple: use Hugo to create the site and host it for free at Netlify.

For a techie, there’s a lot of street cred for doing so…

Hugo + Git = Code

Hugo is a static site generator, essentially converting files written in Markdown to HTML. The benefit here is that your stuff, your site, is just a bunch of files – not a content scrambled into a database somewhere. And those files can easily be managed via Git.

IPv6 + HTTPS = Netlify

Once your files are hosted in Git at GitHub or Bitbucket (which offers free private repos), Netlify takes them from there, building the site with Hugo and deploying the HTML on their CDN. And you get tech kudos for having a site on IPv6 using site encryption from Let’s Encrypt.