Looking for recommendations for a Blog backend

Question

We specialise in building websites for small businesses — who often will have a blog. The platform we were using before Webstudio has a blogging engine built-in, so to use Webstudio we need a replacement. Requirements are simple:

Must be very, very low cost. We cannot increase the cost of hosting, so whatever the cost of the blog is, we'll have to absorb it — and these are low-paying, small business customers.
Must be extremely easy to use. Complex UI and myriad of features is not what these clients need: simple is better.
Of course, must play nice with Webstudio.

We had a look at Zenblog, which sounds absolutely perfect, but $20/month is well above the budget. We are now looking at Blogmaker, as it's listed in the Headless CMS Finder page, but from their API docs it doesn't seem like we're able to do searches/queries.

What would you guys recommend?

yannick | revaliant · Answer

I had the same question and took Wordpress, you can host it yourself for example on Hetzner with cyberpnel and the cost is really low you pay for a vps around 6€ per month and can add as many wordress installations as you need.

For easy to use UI you can customize or minimze Wordpress as you whish maybe the first template takes time but afterwards you can use it for every client. And worpdress is common so clients can use it.

You have a great way to create Articles with Gutenberg or you create your own Collections with Plugins.

If you Customize Wordpress correct your client only sees what is needed and doesn't get overwhelmed

For integration you can use Graphql which is perfect.

But Wordpress is old so you need some Plugins ad there might be an overhead which is unnecessary, an alternative is Payload but its way more work to configure the first time. And with way more I mean really a lot it's like your own app you have to create first.

Bogdan · Answer

Self hosting ghost can be an optionhttps://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

Connor Betts · Answer

Ghost on PikaPods is just $2.5 a month. Probably your best option if you don’t want to have to mess with it. https://www.pikapods.com/apps

Igor Couto · Answer

Thank you for the tips, guys! ❤️I’m definitely going to check out PikaPods!

Mihu · Answer

maybe https://hygraph.com/ with their free tier?

Igor Couto · Answer

Indeed, there are some CMSs with very generous free tiers — I had also already had a look at Sanity. Building a 'simple blog' on a full-featured CMS, however, does have its drawbacks, so I was trying to find a dedicated blogging solution, first...

"FX" · Answer

I can highly recommend using directushttps://directus.io/If you're ok with selfhosting/hosting on a cloud server that is

Supersonic · Answer

I'm going to try Decap CMS. I'm in the same boat as you. I have experience back in the day what I was doing SSG websites...but I'm not sure how that is going to work with Webstudio.

Igor Couto · Answer

There are a few CMSs that are in the Headless CMS Finder page that I don't understand how to 'connect' to Webstudio. These are CMSs that do things like store data on GitHub, and those that do not seem to have a clear API — like Spinal, Front Matter and Decap. Please do let us know how you go.

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Looking for recommendations for a Blog backend