Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 229 posts

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#111

Post by philsnow »

nitrogen wrote: post #88
colinbartlett wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand what you're saying, if the origin for your Cloudfront distribution is an S3 bucket, the link between S3 and Cloudfront is unencrypted? That seems unimaginable to me.

If the origin is an S3 static website, the link is unencrypted but should run over Amazon's own network. Since Amazon has your S3 and CloudFront data anyway, assuming all CF endpoints are under Amazon's control, you don't lose much by having the S3 origin load over http.

What makes you think that when cloudfront requests objects internally from s3, it's using http?

It could just as easily be connecting with s2n and authenticating both endpoints of the connection.

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#112

Post by seanwilson »

I use GitHub pages with Cloudflare (free CDN + HTTPS) for simpler sites but I'm a fan of netlify.com right now. Setup is simple, atomic deploys are simple, rollbacks are simple, caching + cache invalidation + HTTPS is done for you and there's paid plans if you need passwords, form submissions and custom response headers. There's probably cheaper options compared to the paid plan at $9 a month but you have to ask yourself how much your time is worth in comparison if you're burning just 1 hour a month on configuring your hosting.

Deploying over S3 sounds like a bunch of hassle to me. Can you deploy atomically? Can you rollback?

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#113

Post by subpar »

sciurus wrote: post #85
eximius wrote: post #72

NearlyFreeSpeech - fantastic business, incredibly cheap. My domain costs are more than my hosting costs (I pay roughly $2.50 a month for hosting a forum).

I switched from NearlyFreeSpeech to Amazon's S3 and Cloudfront. The main reason I left is that I wanted to use HTTPS, but I didn't want to have to purchase a certificate when there are many good free options available now. NearlyFreeSpeech requires opening a ticket with customer support to update certificates, so using Lets Encrypt isn't really an option there. Amazon offers free certificates for Cloudfront. In addit…

Not sure when you switched, but NearlyFreeSpeech works fine with Lets Encrypt and doesn't require opening a ticket with support. https://deletethis.net/dave/2016-11/Let%27s+Encrypt+NearlyFr...

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#114

Post by libeclipse »

I use github to host the source code for my static Jekyll site, but since github doesn't support HTTPS on custom domains, I use Netlify as a CDN. Netlify automatically hooks me up with an A+ rated Let's Encrypt cert setup.

So my domain points at Netlify, which pulls the site from github.

The total cost of this setup is only the yearly cost of the domain, which you can eliminate too if you use a sub-domain on netlify.

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#115

Post by prh8 »

keehun wrote: post #67
mehdix wrote: post #64

Github pages + Jekyll + Wercker for custom builds Pros: free, convinient (a push ends up as a new post upon a successful build) Cons: no SSL with custom domain on Github (at least not easily)

With Netlify, you get all those things with custom SSL. In fact, you don't even need your own cert as Netlify interfaces with Let's Encrypt on its own to provide a custom certificate. It also lets you interface with Gitlabs (which has its own Github pages competitor) which provides you with free private repos. I think it's a much superior setup than Github.

Are there instructions about hooking up Netlify with GL pages? I'm currently using Cloudflare w/ my Github pages blog, but it was a bit tricky to set up and I'm considering redoing my blog anyways.

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#116

Post by wishinghand »

zatkin wrote: post #95
oliver2213 wrote: post #94

I use a cheap $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet with nginx, Nikola [0], and letsencrypt for ssl. Works great and I can expand easily if I want to add php or other wsgi apps. [0] https://getnikola.com

I did this for a while and ended up expanding out to setting up my own email server, calendar server, and contact server. Needless to say, I'm a happy customer. :-)

Setting up your own email server? You're a much braver person than I.

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#117

Post by _fool »

StavrosK wrote: post #102
hashtagMERKY wrote: post #3

For static sites I used to use surge [0], but now I use Neltify [1] for my site [2], because it offers free SSL on your own domain, and continuous deployment from a GitHub or Gitlab repository. You can set your own build options, for example to build Jekyll. (I have no affiliation with Netlify I just think their service is neat.) [0] https://surge.sh/ [1] https://www.netlify.com/ [2] https://gilly.tk edit: formatting

I wanted to migrate to Netlify (I'm currently very happy with Gitlab pages), but I don't want to have to install all of node just to use their utility. What's wrong with static binaries, or at least Python?

I work for Netlify.

You don't have to use any of our clients to deploy a site; they're just options in case you'd rather build the site yourself than have us build it. I rarely use the clients (we have one in go in addition to the Node.js version: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-go and further our API is scriptable in any language and fully documented here: https://open-api.netlify.com/)

You can (and we do this for you by default) configure GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket to trigger a build whenever you do something at the repo. The default, free behavior builds on pushes or PR's against your selected branch and if it's a PR, shows you a deploy preview rather than publishing at your main URL: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-deploy-p...).

Finally you can drag and drop a zipfile with your site's built contents, if you are in a hurry or less technically inclined.

So, you don't need Node to use us and I don't think most of our customers do use that client; most build direct from their repositories.

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#118

Post by bkgunby »

cklar wrote: post #13

For static sites I use firebase hosting, quite simple to use and it includes a free SSL certificate https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/

I'd appreciate if someone could jump in about the costs of a high traffic website firebase hosting, as I don't have much experience with other hosting platforms.

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#119

Post by milge »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #56

Just to echo... Amazon S3 with CloudFront. No contest. CloudFront has free SSL too. Then AWS Lambda to provide dynamic content via Javascript / API if needed. If you want to get fancy you can even attach it to your domain root (example.com vs www.example.com) using Route53. Which is impossible with many static hosts. Although that requires a hosted Route53 zone which at $2 might very well be 100x your hosting costs.…

I use the Amazon S3 and Route 53 route and pay $.50 to $1.50 a month. It's dirt cheap for solid, reliable static hosting.

Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

#120

Post by K0nserv »

TheArcane wrote: post #110
K0nserv wrote: post #68

I use Github to host the source for my blog/website which is open source. Jekyll for the building which happens on Travis CI. Deployment on S3 with cloudflare as a CDN for SSL and reduced bandwidth. I really like this setup. I wrote a guide called The One Cent Blog[0] a while back detailing how it's setup. Typical months the cost is around $0.01-$0.03. Becuase people usually ask why S3 over Github pages I'll answer i…

I don't understand why you need the S3 if you're already hosting it on github pages.

Sorry about the confusion. The source[0] is hosted on Github, but the actual page when compiled to static files is hosted on S3.

0: https://github.com/k0nserv/hugotunius.se

Post reply on HN