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Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

#21

Post by Ayesh »

shrutipathak wrote: post #9
juangacovas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get cheaper domains, i.e. Porkbun.com is running a 3 per user $4.15 for .com (just looked, I'm happy with them)

I had no idea about Porkbun.com. Thanks for that. Some domains I have been looking for seems cheaper than usual.

As someone who moved entire 20+ domains to porkbun, I can assure you they are a pretty good company. Certainly not a giant, but I never had problems. They are the only few companies that allow https:// domain redirection, email forwarding, and yet provide good prices for domains too.

Updated to fix a tpyo in number.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

#22

Post by KineticLensman »

orisho wrote: post #12

GitHub pages / GitLab pages. I prefer the latter since the CI for pages is less magical and more flexible as a result - you aren't limited to what they support, and they don't claim a 100GB* traffic limit (just fair use). Couple with a cheap .com and free Cloudflare for DNS and caching. * Corrected mistake, was 10GB

Yes.

I followed the tutorial at [0] and had my site [1] running in an afternoon, as promised in the tutorial. The slowest thing was figuring out how to get my (paid-for) custom domain to point at GitHub (although a custom domain isn't essential to get your site running). I've had my site active since May 2018 with essentially zero hassle.

Pleasingly, you don't need to know anything about the version control aspects of Git to publish a site or add new blog pages and then edit them.

>> Must haves: Be able to display a message on the landing page Nice to haves: A Folder to keep articles

Yes to both of your must haves

[0] http://jmcglone.com/guides/github-pages/

[1] https://www.non-kinetic-effects.co.uk/

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

#23

Post by jussij »

> It just seems wrong that I can't just buy a domain and get some random content on it without having Go Daddy charge me $5/month to host it?

In order to host any web page requires a machine to serve up the web content and that machine needs to be running 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

So at a minimum, running that machine requires a safe place to house it, electricity to run it and people to keep an eye on it just to make sure it is still running.

All of those tasks cost money.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

#25

Post by StavrosK »

Funny you should ask, I made just the thing for you the other day:

https://quicksite.stavros.io/

It's just a git repo you can clone, so you own your site (it's not a service or a static site generator). It uses Lektor to generate pages (just because that's what I use, though I'm eyeing Zola as a good alternative), and it supports deploying to Gitlab Pages and Neocities with its CI config. You can also push the site to IPFS with one command (ipfs add -r pages/).

It's also trivial to host on Netlify if you want (just add the repo there). All these services I mention are excellent, but slightly different. Neocities is more of a quirky/indie website community, for example, which I love.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

#26

Post by wenc »

Ayesh wrote: post #21
shrutipathak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea about Porkbun.com. Thanks for that. Some domains I have been looking for seems cheaper than usual.

As someone who moved entire 20+ domains to porkbun, I can assure you they are a pretty good company. Certainly not a giant, but I never had problems. They are the only few companies that allow https:// domain redirection, email forwarding, and yet provide good prices for domains too. Updated to fix a tpyo in number.

I'm sure 0+ was a typo :) ... but porkbun.com sounds interesting. I've been on GoDaddy for years but their UI and marketing is so spammy that a minimalist alternative would be a nice change. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

#28

Post by dmortin »

jussij wrote: post #23

> It just seems wrong that I can't just buy a domain and get some random content on it without having Go Daddy charge me $5/month to host it? In order to host any web page requires a machine to serve up the web content and that machine needs to be running 24 hours a day 7 days a week. So at a minimum, running that machine requires a safe place to house it, electricity to run it and people to keep an eye on it just to…

Heroku, Netlify, AppEngine, Firebase, etc. lots of possibilities to host a personal site completely free.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

#29

Post by richardw »

jussij wrote: post #23

> It just seems wrong that I can't just buy a domain and get some random content on it without having Go Daddy charge me $5/month to host it? In order to host any web page requires a machine to serve up the web content and that machine needs to be running 24 hours a day 7 days a week. So at a minimum, running that machine requires a safe place to house it, electricity to run it and people to keep an eye on it just to…

Serving from S3 with Cloudflare adds tiny marginal cost to both of those companies. I moved a few static sites to that setup. Cost is in compute, storage, etc. not hosting static pages.
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