[joshcrews]

You can get the best of both by using a dynamic site CMS, and then hooking it up to Amazon Cloudfront to cache your html. The only challenge then is page cache expiration. You can set that by either using the http headers for Cache-Control or setting page rules in Cloudfront's admin.

Such a setup will scale like crazy and skip "compilation" steps

[dreamfactory2]

The challenge isn't page caching but object caching and rendering.

SSGs are just a rerun of the 90's and don't solve anything that Varnish doesn't already. Pages are an increasingly quaint notion on an increasingly dynamic, personalised, multi-device web. Time to publish is ever more important as Google SEO measures news sources in minutes and publishing workflows often require instant publishing and internal search where there are handoffs (e.g. a subeditor and picture desk).

The two real problems I see is that ESI is our best solution to rendering (and is a clunky 90s-style design), and that object cache refresh has a tendency to combinatorial explosion.

[syntern]

While it may be shiny and hip to provide the latest and greatest news with very fast publishing cycles, I am not sure if this is for everyone.

Thoughtful articles require time to write and edit, reviewers will spend time on them. Re-running a static site generator to publish them is a fraction of the total time it requires to write a good article.

If, on the other hand, you are not in for quality, then yes, time to publish may be important for you.

[dreamfactory2]

That's really just the difference between news and articles. News events (big trials, disasters etc) are highly time-sensitive and if your income depends on display ads and Google, instant publishing is crucial and something that comes up on RFPs for such systems. Workflow where content is created by multiple people isn't as well understood but can be a source of incredible friction and productivity killer in publishing.

The argument is sometimes made that this doesn't apply to simple blogging and that SSGs of course aren't aimed at pros, but I can say with some certainty that the segment of bloggers who can and want to publish with Git etc is infinitesimally small and quite possibly 100% represented on HN :) That's fine and great if it works for your use case but it pains me a bit to see people re-discovering the very old and disproven model that SSG represents. It's a) highly niche and b) counter to many current and new requirements in content publishing.

The main argument for it is performance but I don't see how it improves on Varnish - albeit w cache warming - and tellingly edge cases of cache warming are getting replayed in SSG increasing complexity. In fact dynamic systems often forgo cache warming as not worth the result much of the time (and can do it selectively), but you don't get that control at all in an SSG system.

[syntern]

This really hits home for me, because I'd love to use a CMS, but I just haven't found that is: (a) easy to use (b) easy to customize.

Just to single out a shortcomings I've recently found: multiple authors with multiple languages, defining short and long version of bio/tagline. The tagline is displayed at the article, which may be tagged with multiple contributors with different roles (author, translator, reviewer), while the author page displays the long version.

I've spent days to figure out what plugin/theme combination (Wordpress or Drupal) would enable me this single feature, and I couldn't figure it out.

Yesterday evening I gave up, and now I have <200 lines of code in Dart (using markdown and mustache), generating static pages that were annotated with metadata, doing just that. To be honest, I'd trade it any time for a decent CMS, I just can't find any.

[grey-area]

No, the main argument is for security, then cost (software updates cost time), then perhaps performance, though as you point out there isn't much difference with a properly configured cache.

Clearly static doesn't suit all sites but if the site is infrequently changed and not too complex or dynamic it is sometimes the best choice. If you have highly dynamic content with multiple authors static is clearly a terrible choice. This is not a zero sum game, there is room for both approaches.

[dreamfactory2]

Given even the White House uses a db backed CMS, security seems a pretty weak argument to be making. Yes, static HTML is sometimes an excellent choice but it doesn't represent any kind of new solution in the space.