GitHub + Netlify makes a really nice combo as well, since Netlify helps with simple form handling (and a bunch of other niceties)
Netlify is awesome.
Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
41–50 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#42I use nearlyfreespeech to host my personal static website. Annual cost is less than 10 dollars. I use namecheap for my domain which is 10-15 dollars/year.
They have a nice estimator https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/estimate
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#43Github + Tiddlywiki. That's what I do for https://philosopher.life/ . It's free (unless you rent a domain name), flexible, and easy to distribute over many kinds of channels.
What is your site about? I've seen it four times this week, but I haven't really figured out why it's popular.
Perhaps it's about frustration with boring convention, and what that looks like when you render it into a website design?
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is your site about? I've seen it four times this week, but I haven't really figured out why it's popular.
Perhaps it's about frustration with boring convention , and what that looks like when you render it into a website design?
Very possibly, though in this case the lack of convention doesn't help me understand what the website is about.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#45Just another option:
V-Server from https://netcup.de ca. 3$/month
.space domain ca. 2$/year from https://gandi.net
(I am not affiliated with any of them)
I wanted to a little bit more e.g. having my own calendar, and hosting my own Mercurial server (since almost nobody supports that anymore, maybe GitLab in the future). Found than out that this offer is good enough for my own VPN and even having my own tiny cloud storage.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#46Do you have an old computer at home, and an internet connection? You can always host it yourself. The electricity used may not be cheaper than paying someone else a few bucks to host it from their data center.
There's a big community around self-hosting at reddit on /r/selfhosted. The sidebar has links to specifically hosting your own website.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#47Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#48Github + Tiddlywiki. That's what I do for https://philosopher.life/ . It's free (unless you rent a domain name), flexible, and easy to distribute over many kinds of channels.
What is your site about? I've seen it four times this week, but I haven't really figured out why it's popular.
I think it's fair to call it a personal site and a public self-model, though I cannot say it merits popularity. Unfortunately, I don't have a short and clean answer for what it is about (though I spend significant energy trying to answer that question). It's a place to think, a conduit to communicate with myself and others, and it's where I do philosophy. Each member of my immediate family writes in a wiki every day. We autonomously tell the stories of our lives with these devices. Some kinds of relationships and conversations require 10,000 hours, and we aim to make art of our lives together. It is my honor to speak with others through my wiki.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#49> 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.
For static sites Firebase is quite good. You get a global CDN by default and the free plan is enough for most personal purposes.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?
#50I've been using GitLab pages along with its CI, and it has been really great for static sites.
For less static websites, I'd recommend signing up for free tier GCP. They give you a (very small) VM for free. I've had no problem running several docker containers backing my personal sites. To be fair, they don't really have much traffic, but for the The GitLab CI is really nice, and I'd recommend it even if you don't go for Pages or GCP. It's pretty simple to set it up to automatically build images (using its personal container registry) and deploy them for you.
With this setup, the only things I pay for are domain names which I use to add SSL via let's encrypt and HAProxy (which also does some routing for me).
Hope this helps give someone some ideas.