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Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

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Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#381

Post by stevage »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #293
thitcanh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically everything you wrote about GitHub Pages is wrong. GitHub Pages is static hosting. If you don’t need Jekyll, don’t use it. There’s nothing special about it. GitHub Pages does NOT charge for custom domains. You can configure any branch for GitHub Pages, or even just the /docs folder on the main branch.

Just as a clarification, much of what you mention has only changed in the last year or so. For a very long time gh-pages branch and Jekyll were assumed (you couldn't even use plugins with Jekyll). Custom domains weren't free. SSL wasn't free. Github is doing great stuff but it has taken time to evolve into the all free all you can eat buffet you see today.

Much more than a year, maybe 2-3 years.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#382

Post by JacobSuperslav »

iamacyborg wrote: post #376
busymom0 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who refers to people as "mayonnaise" and "curry" are racist themselves.

Won’t someone please think of the white people

it's getting harder to be white day by day. /s

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#383

Post by bluecatswim »

yarcob wrote: post #339
livinginfear wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used nfshost for hosting multiple sites for over a decade. They're a fantastic service that's simple, secure, and provides great, fast support. They recently published this blog post: https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2021/01/19/free-speech-in-... After reading this, I made the decision to move my hosting elsewhere. I have never hosted content that is even remotely political, and have no intention to do so. I…

There's a difference between "freely expressing your ideas" and eg. plotting a vigilante kidnapping. The former should be protected, the latter should be reported to the police. A lot of the people who say they want free speech actually have some kind of anarchist fantasy where they can do whatever they want without consequences. It seems like you care about free speech, not anarchism, so I'm not sure why the blog po…

Maybe I'm reading too much into it but that blogpost doesn't sound like it's about anarchism or illegal content to me, it's sounds more like them justifying shutting down "problematic" content (like what happened with Gab or Parler). They also have a paragraph towards the end about how they don't want to host "racists".

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#384

Post by iamacyborg »

Arnavion wrote: post #310
rantwasp wrote: post #269

AWS S3 + Cloudfront. The initial setup can be a little finicky, but once you do get it setup, the rest of the time you only do an S3 sync from your local dir to the S3 bucket. It will also be stupid fast (cloudfront is edge networks) + have ssl + it will not go down if you ever see a surge in traffic. I have several of these and they work beautifully. As far as cost goes: 12$/domain per year + 0.5$/month for route53…

Yes, I have a similar setup on Azure - Azure Storage account with an Azure CDN fronting it. It's less than a single US cent per month for the hosting and bandwidth costs atm.

I did this for a while, the ability to deploy to Azure from within Visual Studio Code was also quite fun.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#385

Post by stevage »

offtop5 wrote: post #331
Sodman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the "GitHub Pages" suggested a lot whenever this question comes up, but it's worth noting that it's against their ToS[0] to use it for commercial purposes: "GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial softwar…

That's a great point. I actually looked at GitHub pages and my main issue with it is there's no way to password lock the site. I don't need serious security here, but I also don't exactly want the entire world to see my HTML playground. I'm not sure why they're doing it this way, it should be a nominal task to restrict viewers to those with read access to your repo, but I think it underscores the use cases they have…

> it should be a nominal task to restrict viewers to those with read access to your repo

I don't think it would be quite that trivial. They would have to inject authentication into your HTML, which could cause lots of things to break.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#386

Post by stevage »

rantwasp wrote: post #269

AWS S3 + Cloudfront. The initial setup can be a little finicky, but once you do get it setup, the rest of the time you only do an S3 sync from your local dir to the S3 bucket. It will also be stupid fast (cloudfront is edge networks) + have ssl + it will not go down if you ever see a surge in traffic. I have several of these and they work beautifully. As far as cost goes: 12$/domain per year + 0.5$/month for route53…

OP literally pointed out AWS as the kind of thing they want to avoid because it's too complicated.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#387

Post by stevage »

aequitas wrote: post #61

Check with your ISP, they often offer some 10 or sometimes 50! MB of free space to host your homepage and images under an account url, eg: http://example.com/~you . Uploading is easy, just FTP your files to their server and your done! I miss the old days :(

Then you're locked into your ISP forever.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#389

Post by srg0 »

ptk921 wrote: post #10

I continue to be a big fan of surge [1]. A number of toy projects/demos of mine have been developed using create-react-app, rendered to static files, then deployed via surge. [1] = https://surge.sh/

I used surge once recently, and it just works. What I didn't figure out when the same site is deployed to the same domain name, and when it gets a new one. I'm sure it's documented, it's just not obvious (and for a throw away web page it didn't matter).

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

#390

Post by 3np »

messo wrote: post #219

Hosting a personal blog on old / cheap hardware at home and accepting some downtime now and then should be a trade-of worth making for most. An interconnected web of documents served from personal computers residing under a desk or in a basement – it is a beautiful thing. We nerds often seem to fall into the trap of over-engineering things, like, spending a lot of time building personal stuff that can scale into the…

Adding to this: If you want/need to mask your residential IP, still want access over clearnet, and have e.g. a VPS with a public IP that can front the traffic, the easiest while still robust way I found to do this is to set up a Wireguard VPN and use either microsocks+proxychains, or vopono.

Bonus that this works even if your server is behind some DMZ or bastion without having to open up the mothership.

(For the use-case of a public personal static site this probably doesn't make much sense; you could just publish to the VPS in the first place. But if you have server-side stuff you must or want to run locally for whatever reason, this is way more straightforward to get right than manually fiddling with iptables, using some SSH tunnel, or setting up redundant reverse proxies)

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