AWS S3 with custom domain
Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
21–30 of 229 posts
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#22as a few people have mentioned, NearlyFreeSpeech.net is my static host of choice. i use them for static blogs (jekyll built) and they work perfectly. non static sites get charged at 1c per day (and you get a MySQL instance for about 1c a day, give or take), and static has no charge per day. you are billed for bandwidth and storage, and can have multiple sites in one account. SSH/SFTP access available also.
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#23dreamhost.
I manage all my sites there. Never had any issues with them, there is SSH access too so I recently set up a Hugo bitbucket pipeline which builds my personal website and rysncs it to dreamhost.
They were very fast to add lets encrypt support, so all that stuff is taken care automagically. Reliability is very good.
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#24Github Pages + cloudflare + travis
why: free, cdn, version-controlled, continuous integration, https, custom domains.
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#25middleman -> s3 -> cloudfront. About $0.15/mo.
Pros: Generally works well, speedy enough, free ssl with Cloudfront, cheap for many sites (most hosts charge per site which catches me out for little projects). I've mostly got the process figured out now...
Cons: not easy or quick to set up, lots of steps to get right, AWS is a terrible UI, Cloudfront invalidations are apparently sent by carrier pigeon so asset hashing is a must, even then it can take a while to see your site updates
I've noticed a high mortality rate among static hosting sites, particularly those "just add files to Dropbox and we publish your site" services. Static hosting services are to ops people what todo list apps are to frontend designers
Also, to your point: you can't, by definition, run php on a static site.
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#26I'm very happy with the service at https://www.scaleway.com
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#27I host my static stuff (with my own domains) at FastMail, it's included in my "standard" plan. Upload is possible via FTP and DAV, the quota is currently 5GB disk space, 2GB or 80K files daily traffic.
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#28www.nearlyfreespeech.net is cheap (really cheap, hence the name) and reliable - they've been around since 2002, and I've used them since 2008.
IIRC I think the name is because they allow a lot of content that other hosts may shy away from.
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#29Another vote for AWS S3 + CloudFront here.
We also have a distributed team updating and looking after our website, and we use BitBucket as our git repo. Recently implemented their Pipelines feature to auto update the S3 bucket and refresh CloudFront resources with any changes pushed to the repo.
Makes it really easy now - just a 'git push' and Bam!, the website is updated and CloudFront auto invalidates all the old assets and starts serving up the new stuff. Really smooth.
Re: Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?
#30I use Nginx either on my basement server (I have 50/50 fiber internet at home) or I use one of my digital ocean droplets, which can be as cheap as 5$ a month, that is less than my server at home uses in power. A Raspberry pi would also suffice if there is not too much traffic I guess, that would cost you about 10€ a year in power. Running a whole server means there is no limit to the amount of sites you can run (apart from memory and bandwidth of course.)
Both my servers (DO vps and basement) run Ubuntu 16.04, I use PHP-fpm for PHP, domains I purchase at a local registrar (.nl domains are about 10€/year), for ssl I use lets encrypt. For simple sites I always use Bootstrap for the css.
FTP is implicit if you count SFTP as FTP (FTP over SSH). Under Linux SFTP is mounted as easily as any network share.
At home I run a Nextcloud instance and share some directories as Nginx roots, that means I can locally (even on my phone) edit a static web page and it is synced immediately to the webserver's root folder. This can be quite convenient.