A comprehensive guide to designing, building, and deploying self-hosted comment systems for static sites.
About This Book
This book provides a complete technical guide for developers and site owners who want to implement their own comment system instead of relying on paid services like Disqus, Commento, or Hyvor Talk. You’ll learn the architecture patterns, implementation strategies, and operational considerations for building a robust, scalable, and spam-resistant comment platform.
Who This Book Is For
- Web developers building or maintaining static websites
- DevOps engineers looking to self-host comment infrastructure
- Technical bloggers who want full control over their comment data
- Open-source enthusiasts interested in alternatives to proprietary solutions
- Anyone frustrated with the costs or limitations of existing comment services
What You’ll Learn
- Why and when to build your own comment system
- Various architectural approaches (serverless, traditional, edge-based)
- Database choices and data modeling for comments
- Authentication strategies without compromising static site benefits
- Spam prevention techniques (CAPTCHA, honeypots, rate limiting, ML-based)
- Moderation workflows and content filtering
- Deployment options and cost optimization
- Performance considerations and caching strategies
- Security best practices and GDPR compliance
Book Structure
The book is organized into 14 chapters that take you from understanding the problem space to deploying a production-ready comment system.
Author Notes
This book focuses on practical, implementable solutions with working code examples. All architectures discussed have been battle-tested on real websites with varying traffic levels. Cost estimates are based on 2024-2025 cloud provider pricing.
Table of Contents