I am trying to get a local org I am in set up with a domain and website just to have a place to point people for everything. We would like to keep it as cheap as possible. I figure we need the following:
-Domain name (going to use namecheap probably)
-VPS host (I haven’t done this before, it looks like racknerd may be way to go?). I assume I will probably only need 1GB of memory as it will just be a static webserver but that may be too little, not 100% sure.
-Email host. This is one of two real reasons I want to own the domain, we have multiple uses for email but currently everything is under one gmail address and a lot gets lost in the clutter. A few people in our org would like to stick with gmail but I am open to other suggestions. Definitely do not want to deal with self hosting on this.
-Website builder. I plan to use an Ubuntu server with the LEMP stack on the VPS, should I just use Wordpress? I am definitely not experienced in website building so it’s not realistic to do my own HTTP. My only concern is using Wordpress will result in a poorly optimized site that may strain my limited resources, but there are also a few people in our org that have experience with it so that would help.
While I have a decent amount of tech experience generally, these are mostly uncharted waters for me. I know this comes across as kind of half baked, but really I am just looking for general advice!
For the website. If you just want to serve static content with no user input processing, you should use hugo, if blogging/newsletter is the most you’ll realistically do. I’d advise this over WordPress since you won’t have to worry about maintenance so much.
Hugo also allows for writing posts in markdown, which are accessible to anyone who has a program that edits a text file.
You might also want to look into things like Nextcloud for many different services, but that’s if you’re willing to scale up.