Comments

This site now has comments, right below this post. I didn’t want trackers, ads or cookie banners so I’m running Remark42, a small open-source, self-hosted comment engine.

How it’s hosted

The whole thing runs as a small Docker container on Render’s free tier. Free comes with a catch though: the container’s disk is wiped every time it restarts (which happens automatically after ~15 minutes without traffic). So the comment data can’t just live there.

To solve that, the container itself pushes a backup to a private Git repository every time something changes, and restores from that repo on startup. Downside is the cold-start, so comments will usually only show up after a few seconds, and maybe sometimes one will get lost. That’s the trade-off for not paying for always-on hosting for a low-traffic blog.

Feel free to try it out below. I’ll probably add some different auth options later

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