Recently, my developer friend Shailendra contacted me for some advice on starting his website. He wanted a simple website where he could publish blog posts and create his portfolio.
Shailendra had a very genuine question though, what platform/CMS should he use to create the blog?
And, after giving this a proper thought, I came up with the following solution:
- set up blog.shailendra.dev subdomain for blogging using the platform Hashnode, and
- create a one-page portfolio site using HTML-CSS on the root domain
He definitely loved the idea and I think other developers should also go with this idea.
📢 If you ask me, why Hashnode?
I recommend Hashnode because it’s not just a CMS or a blogging platform, it’s a huge community for all kinds of developers. Publishing on Hashnode can bring you traffic from day one, while a blog using self-hosted solutions like WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix, or by using any static site generators.
In the above tweet, Akos explains that his blog used to receive about 20-50 visitors per week but after he migrated to Hashnode, he was able to receive 200+ weekly visitors. And, in this post, he explains why exactly he moved to Hashnode.
Now, that’s the power of a strong community.
📢 Another question is, why the subdomain, why not the root domain?
Most of the time, developers do not have a different website to show their portfolio and a different one to blog.
And, Hashnode is ONLY for blogging. You can’t have a custom homepage showing your portfolio.
So, if you connect your root domain to Hashnode, visitors will only be able to see the latest blog posts of yours instead of information about yourself like who you are and what you do.
You can create a simple portfolio page using plain HTML-CSS for your root domain (yourdomain.com) and host it on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages for 100% free.
Makes sense, right?
📢 Why didn’t I suggest WordPress to my friend?
Well, it’s a completely new thing to him, he’s just getting started and he won’t yet know if he will be able to keep up with it.
Then why spend so much money to buy a decent WordPress hosting when you can host your blog for free on Hashnode!
WordPress is great, no doubts. I do have my main blog running using the self-hosted WordPress solution and I pay ~$20 per month to DigitalOcean (👈 referral link, get $100 when you sign up) for hosting. But the thing is when you are just getting started it’s not a wise solution.
📢 Any limitations of Hashnode?
As a blogging platform, it’s excellent — loads fast, looks awesome and has amazing SEO support. But there are some limitations that you may feel:
- fewer options for customization
- you do not have 100% control over look & feel
But again, WordPress or other platforms have limitations too.
📢 So developers, host your blogs on Hashnode and your portfolio on Netlify for free.
And, do not forget that you can always migrate away from Hashnode at any time — thanks to 301 redirects.
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