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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?

#191

Post by throwaway2016a »

unknownsavage wrote: post #184
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.…

> Just to echo... Amazon S3 with CloudFront. No contest. Yeah, until someone decides they don't like you and downloads a few terabytes of data over and over. It costs about average $0.09 per GB from CloudFront out to the world, and add in the costs from S3 to Cloudfront itself. I had a $200 bill one month due to that, and the next month went with CloudFlare (no usage based billing) and github.

I addressed that partially with.

> Only downside is if your traffic spikes you have no control over the cost. There is no upper bounds. With that said, it would take a tremendous amount of traffic to balloon the costs to anything worth worrying about. And at least you can be sure your website will actually stay up.

However, proper use of cache headers can help with that since Cloudfront respects them and won't hit S3 again if the header isn't expired. So at least that helps.

The scenario you described is my nightmare scenario.

Also, Cloudfront now has a WAF (Web Application Firewall) that can help with this. Although it too has some costs.

Edit:

Another alternative that is pretty straight forward although non-zero work is to set up a CloudWatch alarm on your monthly bill and when it gets to high make an API call to shut off the cloudfront distribution (cloudwatch can trigger SNS which can trigger Lambda which can make the API call).

It's a PITA but worth it to save hundreds.

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

#192

Post by user5994461 »

K0nserv wrote: post #179
user5994461 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Typical months the cost is around $0.01-$0.03. For how many visitors?

Not that many admittedly, about 10k requests from 1.5k unique users in the past month. With that said 10m requests would still only come out at $4 so it's still a good choice for most low traffic sites.

I just checked one article on my WordPress to have a point of comparison. That's 87 requests total and 4.7 MB.

The first page of HN (and reposts) will bring over 100k views in the month.

Either I'm crazy, or that's about 1M HTTP requests and 500 GB of traffic to serve u_u

Serving that over S3 or CloudFront would be $45 (mostly traffic charge). OMG. Definitely not a bill i want for my personal blog.

That's a great idea for a future post: "The day I listened to HN advice and bankrupted myself by hosting my blog on S3". With a live counter and animations to see how much each visitor is ruining me in real time, it will be awesome! :D

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

#193

Post by kyledrake »

sogen wrote: post #150
kyledrake wrote: post #141

I'm biased, but Neocities ( https://neocities.org ) can do all of these things and is a great choice for static web hosting. We run a global anycast CDN with instant cache purging, custom domains with Let's Encrypt SSL, high availability architecture, and all the rest. We haven't had a full site hosting outage in years. We include 10GB storage 2TB BW for free (more of both included soon) for $5/mo, which would cost o…

You should give a link to custom domains in the front page, took me a while to find you offer that. Btw are you related to Geocities??

No relation (except for the site I once had on there). Sadly, Geocities is long gone. My attempts to acquire the domain name and relaunch the site (at a bare minimum to restore the old sites to their proper location) have not been successful.

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

#194

Post by kyledrake »

marktangotango wrote: post #57
vanderZwan wrote: post #16

I have a soft spot for Neocities, which is trying to be everything we loved about Geocities, but for a modern age: https://neocities.org/ ZERO ADVERTISEMENTS , even for the free plan. Supports only static hosting, is free for 100mb websites with bandwidth of 50GB per month, or five dollars per month for 10,000mb with 2TB and a number of other extra features. EDIT: As mentioned by detaro, custom domain only supported…

I loved geocities too, and I always wished I"d had a CORS backend to call from my HTML pages. I built a service specifically to be a CORS backend for neocities. You can signup, and start making CORS calls from your neocities pages to a sqlite database on my service. I tried several times to contact the owner of neocities about this but he never responded. Since then I implemented static file hosting and pivoted to a…

> You can signup, and start making CORS calls from your neocities pages to a sqlite database on my service.

If I'm understanding what you're trying to do, this isn't on our end. Neocities currently doesn't prevent sites from making API calls to other servers - that's on your HTTP server's side, you control that.

Occasionally I get requests to allow HTML hosted on Neocities to make API calls directly to Neocities itself - which would be OK for things like basic stats lookup, but for things like file uploading/deleting/editing this is dangerous, because it would allow attackers to write scripts to hack people's accounts that can be executed by their own browsers. This is called a CSRF attack, and that's why we prevent people from doing that.

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

#195

Post by StavrosK »

_fool wrote: post #117
StavrosK wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Thank you, I'm one of those impossible customers who goes "oh I want a free tier, and oh, I don't like node, and oh, I don't want to give you access to my Gitlab", but it's great that you have a Go version of the client. I think I'm going to switch everything to you, I've been wanting to for a while!

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

#196

Post by kyledrake »

vanderZwan wrote: post #16

I have a soft spot for Neocities, which is trying to be everything we loved about Geocities, but for a modern age: https://neocities.org/ ZERO ADVERTISEMENTS , even for the free plan. Supports only static hosting, is free for 100mb websites with bandwidth of 50GB per month, or five dollars per month for 10,000mb with 2TB and a number of other extra features. EDIT: As mentioned by detaro, custom domain only supported…

Thanks for the warm words!

> ZERO ADVERTISEMENTS, even for the free plan. Supports only static hosting, is free for 100mb websites with bandwidth of 50GB per month, or five dollars per month for 10,000mb with 2TB and a number of other extra features

Haven't announced yet, but these numbers are all increasing soon. Well, except for the advertising one. I'm literally in the datacenter right now working on it.

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

#197

Post by _fool »

StavrosK wrote: post #195
_fool wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Thank you, I'm one of those impossible customers who goes "oh I want a free tier, and oh, I don't like node, and oh, I don't want to give you access to my Gitlab", but it's great that you have a Go version of the client. I think I'm going to switch everything to you, I've been wanting to for a while!

awesome to hear! I'm the guy you'll talk to if you have a support question, so I hope to not hear from you soon (since that would mean that everything worked as expected :))

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

#198

Post by themodelplumber »

atmosx wrote: post #145
nodejs-news wrote: post #45

I'm a great self-hosting fan, behind my DSL connection using 2 x RaspberryPI. I have 3 static web sites, 2 with Jekyll, 1 with Hugo, with great perf : checkout webpagetest -> https://www.webpagetest.org/result/161123_0R_8RDY/ and feel free to check my 3 web sites: - http://www.it-wars.com - http://www.louer-hendaye.com - http://www.nodejs-news.com Init : 2 RaspberryPi + electric plugs : 2x 30$ + 2 x6$ Monthly bill: e…

You have a static IP?

You can use a client to update the record of your dynamic IP. I don't know if that's what he's doing, but it's in all the Pi web hosting tutorials.

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

#199

Post by _fool »

_fool wrote: post #117
StavrosK wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

oops, I linked our Go library not our go client. You'll want https://github.com/netlify/netlifyctl for the client!

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

kyledrake wrote: post #194
marktangotango wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved geocities too, and I always wished I"d had a CORS backend to call from my HTML pages. I built a service specifically to be a CORS backend for neocities. You can signup, and start making CORS calls from your neocities pages to a sqlite database on my service. I tried several times to contact the owner of neocities about this but he never responded. Since then I implemented static file hosting and pivoted to a…

> You can signup, and start making CORS calls from your neocities pages to a sqlite database on my service. If I'm understanding what you're trying to do, this isn't on our end. Neocities currently doesn't prevent sites from making API calls to other servers - that's on your HTTP server's side, you control that. Occasionally I get requests to allow HTML hosted on Neocities to make API calls directly to Neocities itse…

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