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

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It says so in the CloudFront distribution setup, when you point it at an s3-website-[region] URL instead of directly at an S3 bucket.

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

#133
post #124

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.

Does the free Netlify plan provide a cert?

It sets it up through Let's Encrypt with one click.

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

#134

Uberspace.de Shell Access, pretty much every common language available, service running, databases, mail, etc.. No bullshit hosting in germany, Pay what you want (1€/month minimum). Absolute best, I'm hosting about 25 projects with them for various bands, etc. and haven't had any problems whatsoever.

Can't find english language switch. Only german then?

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

#136
Nearly Free Speech (nearlyfreespeech.net aka NFSN). [1] I'd strongly recommend you try it, without purchasing a domain, and see for yourself how far the initial trial takes you (you get a 25 cent credit when you create an account). Even if you decide to try something else, it's worth your time to read NFSN's FAQ [2] to know more about the service and policies. It's quite impressive.

Advantages:

1. Excluding domain costs, which are reasonable (and even cheaper than many others), you can have small static sites for pennies a month, or even pennies a year if you put the free tier of CloudFlare in front of it (with DNS changes). It's really dirt cheap!

2. It's the most honest service I've seen, where you pay close to what you actually use.

3. The owner/admin is a no-nonsense person and is available on the forums to help with things that don't need extensive support involvement.

Disadvantages:

1. You need to be tech savvy (at least know how to use an FTP client to upload your static files and use the BSD shell if you wish to play around with application setup or other things over ssh). NFSN does not have any fancy control panels (like cPanel) where you can do one click installs of WordPress or other applications.

2. For PHP and MySQL based applications, setup is not difficult at all. But if you want any other application server (like Node or Rails or Django), you would have to do more work to get it set up.

3. If you truly need support, then there's a paid support subscription (it's optional). For most requirements the forums would suffice.

4. If your site grows a lot (in terms of disk space used, network traffic used and resources used), then NFSN could become very expensive compared to the commonly oversold $5 a month or $10 a month services that promise a lot but depend on most users not reaching their promised limits.

[1]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

[2]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq

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

#137
post #55

I'm very happy with the service at https://www.scaleway.com

Their pricing looks insane? Like an order of magnitude less than DO, OVH, ... Edit: Looks like it's because they're using Atom and ARM based servers.

What's that mean for the common folk? Are they slower?

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

#138
post #78

RamNode: 128MB RAM 15GB storage, $15/year. Cheapest I have found yet for a tiny VPS. Perfect for static pages, but a little bit of PHP might be fine.

Seconded. In 18 months my RamNode VPS has had one unexpected reboot, but other than that it has been flawless.

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

#140

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 your…

I use a static site generated called 'middleman' for my blog. I tested S3 deployment in the past and I must that it's not all that complicated.

The PITA is that you need Cloudfront to handle SSL and if you're not using Route53 automating the upgrade process is more complex than it should be.

> Can you deploy atomically?

Hm, I'm not sure what atomically means in this context, S3 supports 'sync' so you basically can write a bash/ruby/python script to handle deployment (I use a rake task).

> Can you rollback?

Yes, I use git (gitlab) to keep track of changes, so rolling back is not a problem.

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