My experience with hostnotion.co

中文版/Chinese version - https://www.michahuang.com/hostnotion-xin-de/

I started using notion to organize my life in May 2021. I really liked the default layouts of notion and wanted my website to look just like it.

TLDR: tried out hostnotion.co, ended up switching to Ghost

The pros - #nocode

Using notion + hostnotion.co makes setting up a pretty site incredibly easy.

All you have to do is:

  1. Get a personal domain. I got mine from Google Domains for $12/yr.
  2. Follow this 5 steps guide from hostnotion to set up a public link sharable notion page and set up DNS settings on your domain registrar. I actually did not have to setup forwarding with Google Domains, so it was only 4 steps.

Setting up - minor hiccup with Google Domains + hostnotion

The only problem I ran into was setting up Google Domains with hostnotion.co

I eventually figured it out. Google Domains was throwing an error since I was playing around with Google Sites. I had to remove the cname linking to the sample Google site and update the CNAME for hostnotion.

the only thing I had to play with on Google Domains
Running site up in < 1hr

The cons

I ended up not using hostnotion and switching to Ghost because of 2 reasons:  

  • hostnotion had a slow load time - every time I went to visit my website, it would happen in 2 steps.
  • hostnotion went down for a few hours the first day I signed up 😟

Follow my future posts to see how I made this simple site with Ghost.