Just like any blogger, I also wanted to start my own blog. I had many doubts. What is my niche? Will people read my blog? Which platform to use for blogging? I do not know if I have found my answers, but for the last one it is HUGO. Yes, I searched for different blogging platforms and all had their own set of drawbacks. Here are few reasons for not selecting them :

  1. Blogger : Free, SEO optimized, but no good themes
  2. Wordpress : Good themes, SEO Optimized, but costly
  3. Quora : Good theme, Free, but not SEO optimized

I would have used Wordpress, but I discovered HUGO, which is times faster and way cheaper than Wordpress. Here I am on Hugo and doing amazing stuffs. Here are the reasons why I love Hugo:

Fast, very fast

I did my research and found out that hugo is faster than Wordpress and many other products(static site generators) like Jekyll and Octopress2. You can see this video on hugo official website and get the estimate. For detailed comparison, this blog is also an awesome resource.

In simple words, Hugo creates and stores your HTML file just once. This reduces the delay of creating HTML content every time. These files do not require much resource(CPU, Memory, etc), thus it can be hosted cheap.

Themes, beautiful themes

I am crazy about the look and feel of anything. Say me nuts, but I will not use anything that does not look good. It may have lot of functionalities, but the feel is equally important to me. Hugo has a good set of themes you can choose from and customize, if needed. You can also create your own theme. This is also a theme called as Hugo Crips. I liked it for its simplicity. You can explore more hugo themes at themes.gohugo.io.

Ease of Setup

Setting up hugo is also really easy. They have setup files for most of the Operating system. You can find them here. You can just click and install it just like any other operating system. For ubuntu users they can download hugo_0.15_amd64.deb or *.deb files depending on their platform. Then installing is just a matter of clicks.

Host for free

It is almost free to host them. They can be hosted for free on github or bitbucket with links to their respective official tutorial. You can also see how to host a static website easily on github.

A domain will cost you just $5 per year.

Warning

Hugo has lots of features built-in, like syntax highlighting, table of contents, pagination, etc. It has almost all the things you need for content development. If you want something more, you may have to wait or tinker around. Optimistically, you may create something which is missing and help the whole hugo community.

Conclusion

Do you see Hugo is fast, beautiful, easy and free. If you can take initial trouble of setting it up and getting is started, which is minimal, you are going to reap its benefits. Tough, you should remember hugo has just started its journey. So, awaken the hacker in you and get started…