A static blog on shared cPanel hosting: Markdown, Node, and FTP deploys

This blog lives on shared cPanel hosting, the same kind of plan you get for a few dollars a month, with no Node on the server, no CI, nothing like Netlify or Vercel. Even so, publishing a static blog there is straightforward: the HTML is generated on my machine and uploaded over FTP. Here's how it's put together, in case you want to replicate it.

#Why static, and why cPanel

A personal blog doesn't need a database or an admin panel. With HTML files:

• There's nothing to patch or update on the server (no more "WordPress needs updating" warnings).
• The page loads in milliseconds, because Apache only has to serve files.
• The content lives in git, as plain text, editable with any editor.

And cPanel, for all its age, has exactly what's needed: an Apache server that serves folders, supports .htaccess, and accepts FTP uploads.

#Writing: Markdown with front matter

Each post is a file under posts/<lang>/ with a metadata header (front matter) and Markdown content:

---
title: Post title
description: 140-160 character summary for Google and social.
date: 2026-09-10
category: Tools
tags: [cpanel, ftp]
cover: /assets/img/my-cover.jpg
keyPoints:
  - First key idea.
  - Second key idea.
---

Content in **Markdown**…

The URL comes from the file name: posts/en/2026-09-10-my-title.md publishes at /posts/my-title/. If the file has draft: true, it isn't published. A command (npm run new -- "Title") creates the file with the template ready to go.

#Generating: a framework-free Node script

The generator is a single file, build.js, that does three things: reads the .md files, converts them to HTML with marked, and inserts them into HTML templates with a minimal variable engine ({{ title }}, {{#if}}, {{#each}}). The output goes to dist/:

dist/
├── index.html                  homepage (paginated at /page/2/, /page/3/…)
├── posts/<slug>/index.html     each post
├── posts/<slug>.md             the same post as clean Markdown
├── category/<name>/            category listings (categoria/<nombre>/ in Spanish)
├── assets/                     css, js, images
├── sitemap.xml · rss.xml · robots.txt · llms.txt · 404.html
└── .htaccess                   Apache configuration

No Jekyll, Hugo, or Astro. I have nothing against them, but for a blog with a custom design (the same one as the portfolio) it was faster to write 500 lines of JavaScript than to learn each tool's templating conventions. And npm run dev spins up a local server that mimics Apache to preview the result before uploading.

#Configuring Apache: the .htaccess file

This is where it differs from a modern CDN: on cPanel, everything is configured with an .htaccess file that the generator writes automatically into dist/. The essentials:

Options -Indexes
DirectoryIndex index.html
AddType text/markdown .md
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
  RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  <FilesMatch "\.(css|js)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable"
  </FilesMatch>
  <FilesMatch "\.(html|md|txt|xml)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "public, max-age=300, must-revalidate"
  </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css text/javascript application/javascript
</IfModule>

Clean URLs (/posts/my-title/) work on their own because every post is a folder with its own index.html. CSS and JS carry ?v=<build-id> in the URL, so they can be cached for a year without risking stale versions.

#Publishing: incremental FTP with a manifest

Uploading all of dist/ on every change is slow over FTP. Instead, the deploy script stores a .deploy-manifest.json file on the server with the SHA-1 hash of every uploaded file. On the next deploy:

1. It downloads the manifest and computes the hashes of dist/.
2. It uploads only new or modified files.
3. It deletes from the server files that were in the manifest and no longer exist (say, a deleted post). It never touches files it didn't upload itself.
4. It uploads the updated manifest.

Fixing a typo in a post means uploading two files (the HTML and the .md) plus the feeds, not hundreds. The FTP client is the Node package basic-ftp, and the credentials live in a .env file that isn't versioned:

npm run deploy:dry   # connects and shows what it would upload, without touching anything
npm run deploy       # build + incremental upload

#SEO and AI assistants

Since the HTML is fully generated, it's easy to include everything search engines expect: canonical tags, Open Graph, JSON-LD structured data (BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList, an automatic FAQPage from the FAQ section), sitemap.xml, and RSS.

And for AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity), which send more and more traffic every year, the blog publishes:

• /llms.txt, a site index in the llmstxt.org format.
• /llms-full.txt, with the entire content in a single Markdown file.
• Every post at /posts/<slug>.md, linked from the HTML with <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">.
• An "In summary" block at the top of every article with the key ideas.

#Frequently asked questions

#Does this work on a subdomain, or only at the root?

Both. The generator has a configurable basePath per language: empty if a language lives at blog.mydomain.com, or /es if it lives at blog.mydomain.com/es/. All internal routes, the .htaccess, and the sitemap adjust automatically.

#What if the hosting doesn't support FTPS?

The script works with plain FTP, explicit FTPS, or implicit FTPS; it's chosen with an environment variable. If the hosting's certificate doesn't match the server name, another variable lets you accept it anyway.

#How do I add images to a post?

Copy them to assets/img/ and reference them as /assets/img/file.jpg. Keep covers under about 250 KB. If you replace an image, use a new file name: images are cached for a month.

#Can I use this system with a different design?

Yes. The templates live in layout/ (header, footer, post card, post page) and the styles in a single framework-free CSS file. Changing the design means editing those files.

#Conclusion

Shared hosting isn't a limit on having a fast, well-ranked, easy-to-maintain blog. Markdown for writing, a Node script for generating, .htaccess for configuring Apache, and incremental FTP for publishing: four small pieces that are easy to understand in full.