Implementing a third-party comment engine into your site/blog

Self-hosted vs CMS / Preface

Built-in plugins are nice to have, but unless you've built a site from scratch - it's likely that you're limited to comment engines within your CMS, whether it be Wordpress, Ghost, Joomla, or the various other platforms available today.

While I love most of the features Ghost provides, none of their built-in comment engines give the ability to post anonymously, which I would prefer; as forcing a user to subscribe or sign up for your newsletter just in order to make a comment on a post seems like a bit much(IMO).

How to get started(VPS/webOS)

I'll be going over two comment engines I like and two different methods of both creating and implementing the engines into your site. We'll start with the comment engine I'm using on this blog as well as my other at the moment - Commento. It's useful for me at the moment because I've to move my domains and hosting environment from being totally self-hosted to being hosted on a VPS.

Commento can also be setup via self-hosting/using a reverse-proxy. Something I've done in the past with the other comment engine I'll be talking about later. Because of the simplicity of hosting via a VPS/"Operating System" via Yunohost - all of the configuration for setting up the NGINX host, spam prevention, LDAP, and DNS(mostly) are setup already.

This is not limited to any VPS in particular, I use DigitalOcean but this should be the same if you're using Hostwinds, Amazon EC2, Azure VMs, etc etc. The same goes for Yunohost, there are plenty of alternatives if you want to go down the webOS route.

I recommend this method over self-hosting unless you're only focusing on one site/domain and are comfortable with and don't mind setting up the configuration for the rest of the services yourself. You can see the final result at the bottom of this page.

Self-hosting a comment engine

The cheaper but more labor-intensive method is to just self-host a comment engine yourself. I'll be using remark42 as an example as I've used it in the past and hosted it on my beaten down old Dell laptop – which worked great! Similar to Commento, it's really just a server holding your site's comments(as well as the tools to moderate said comments) which is sending and receiving HTTP requests by way of the JS snippet you implement into your pages.

The setup on my rusty old Dell was as follows:

If you're familiar with Docker and Linux, this may be simple enough for you to setup and get going within an hour. If not, I highly advise you read through the documentation and learn how to setup a simple NGINX web server before continuing on with this route.

I honestly had no intentions of making this a post about the relative ease of setup between no-code environments like a VPS/webOS vs a fully self-hosted environment; but as someone who's done both it's hard to ignore the differences and pitfalls that come with a fully self-hosted environment inevitably come with – unless of course you're more comfortable within that environment and have guardrails already in place.

Conclusion

Both self-hosting on your own hardware/using frameworks like Astro or Gatsby, or using a VPS are viable methods to get your comment engine running – I've done both and have found that using a VPS is quicker and easier to setup due it's autonomous nature, but self-hosting if need-be is a legitimate alternative as long as you do your due diligence and set it up correctly.