So I've moved this site to just use static HTML files, using Jinja2 as templating. The benefit of this is that it means everything is stored in version control and there is no database.

Having no database removes the hassle of having to deal with backups. All the data for the site that I care about is checked into git, and that's the end of it. This make it much much harder for me to lose data and means I have the history of any changes.

This also means that I can type into a text file rather than into a browser window.

Hosting is still (at present) on Heroku, which has the following benefits:

• being free, for a site of this size
• I have already setup the DNS
• I already have an account on Heroku

However, the deployment is a little bit of a hack. It uses the fact that Heroku's default PHP deployment just serves static files. So we do just enough to let Heroku believe that we are deploying PHP, and the rest just happens. Moving it to S3 would probably make more sense, but there's not much incentive given that Heroku is free and good enough for what I want it to do.