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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?

#81

Post by Nadya »

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…

Neocities is slightly more expensive hosting (if I want to use my custom domain, which I do) than other options. $5/mo is still really affordable though and I like what they're doing so I chose to support them.

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

#82

Post by colinbartlett »

bkgunby wrote: post #75
gtsteve wrote: post #17

I use AWS S3, which I put behind a Cloudfront distribution. It's quick to set up, and there are no servers to keep up to date and patched. You also get free SSL for your Cloudfront distribution via AWS certificate manager. For stuff like Contact Us forms, I use AWS Lambda to post the data into my company's CMS. We've had this setup for about a year now and it works quite well. The cost is almost nothing but we don't…

It's worth noting that SSL only works between the browser and Cloudfront servers. Last time I checked there wasn't an option to use SSL with s3. It's not a deal breaker, but it was enough to make me look for alternatives.

If I understand what you're saying, if the origin for your Cloudfront distribution is an S3 bucket, the link between S3 and Cloudfront is unencrypted? That seems unimaginable to me.

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

#83

Post by d0lph »

JoelTheSuperior wrote: post #77
brianbreslin wrote: post #74

For some cheap VPS you can try searching on https://lowendbox.com/ some are like $2/month (usually a year commitment)

Downside of this is that you then have to administer and secure a VPS.

Which is not as much of an issue for a static site.

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

#84

Post by 0xCMP »

K0nserv wrote: post #68

I use Github to host the source for my blog/website which is open source. Jekyll for the building which happens on Travis CI. Deployment on S3 with cloudflare as a CDN for SSL and reduced bandwidth. I really like this setup. I wrote a guide called The One Cent Blog[0] a while back detailing how it's setup. Typical months the cost is around $0.01-$0.03. Becuase people usually ask why S3 over Github pages I'll answer i…

However, you can simplify this on your computer like I do by having a repo with your source, disabling jekyll on github, and pushing the results to the user.github.io repo so that github acts like s3 and you get a $0.00 blog.

Nice thing for S3 though is you could cloudfront it if you wanted to for some reason. And it's in your control.

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

#85

Post by sciurus »

eximius wrote: post #72

NearlyFreeSpeech - fantastic business, incredibly cheap. My domain costs are more than my hosting costs (I pay roughly $2.50 a month for hosting a forum).

I switched from NearlyFreeSpeech to Amazon's S3 and Cloudfront.

The main reason I left is that I wanted to use HTTPS, but I didn't want to have to purchase a certificate when there are many good free options available now. NearlyFreeSpeech requires opening a ticket with customer support to update certificates, so using Lets Encrypt isn't really an option there. Amazon offers free certificates for Cloudfront.

In addition to gaining HTTPS support for free, my hosting costs went from a couple bucks a month to less than 50 cents a month.

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

#86

Post by positr0n »

K0nserv wrote: post #68

I use Github to host the source for my blog/website which is open source. Jekyll for the building which happens on Travis CI. Deployment on S3 with cloudflare as a CDN for SSL and reduced bandwidth. I really like this setup. I wrote a guide called The One Cent Blog[0] a while back detailing how it's setup. Typical months the cost is around $0.01-$0.03. Becuase people usually ask why S3 over Github pages I'll answer i…

I like your Travis CI setup, I may copy it myself.

Here's the workflow I currently use if the OP wants something with less moving parts. I just use s3_website from the command line. It will even create the s3/cloudfront configuration completely automatically.

    gem install s3_website
    ; set up s3_website.yml and AWS environment variables
    s3_website cfg apply ; this creates and configures the S3 bucket and cloudfront configuration
    s3_website push ; push to S3, invalidate cloudfront caches

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

#88

Post by nitrogen »

colinbartlett wrote: post #82
bkgunby wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that SSL only works between the browser and Cloudfront servers. Last time I checked there wasn't an option to use SSL with s3. It's not a deal breaker, but it was enough to make me look for alternatives.

If I understand what you're saying, if the origin for your Cloudfront distribution is an S3 bucket, the link between S3 and Cloudfront is unencrypted? That seems unimaginable to me.

If the origin is an S3 static website, the link is unencrypted but should run over Amazon's own network. Since Amazon has your S3 and CloudFront data anyway, assuming all CF endpoints are under Amazon's control, you don't lose much by having the S3 origin load over http.

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

#89

Post by wtracy »

I've been a happy customer of Register4Less.com for years, and they throw in free static hosting with every domain name. It does everything you mention except PHP and Markdown. (But you could do Markdown yourself with a static site generator!) They also provide free WHOIS privacy, which is nice.

An extra $1.45/month gets you PHP and CGI hosting, plus raised quotas.

My only caveats: The free hosting tier only gets you 10MB of space per domain (no bandwidth quotas, though!) Which has been plenty for me for everything except large photo galleries, but YMMV. Also, I've had terrible experience with their domain backordering service--the domain I backordered was quietly released and became publicly available without a peep from R4L.

Their actual domain hosting, website hosting, and technical support has been stellar, though. (Websites are actually hosted on a shared server somewhere at OVH, if Ican trust the reverse DNS info.)

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

#90

Post by nitrogen »

falcolas wrote: post #58
gtsteve wrote: post #17

I use AWS S3, which I put behind a Cloudfront distribution. It's quick to set up, and there are no servers to keep up to date and patched. You also get free SSL for your Cloudfront distribution via AWS certificate manager. For stuff like Contact Us forms, I use AWS Lambda to post the data into my company's CMS. We've had this setup for about a year now and it works quite well. The cost is almost nothing but we don't…

A quick note on the S3/Cloudfront option - make sure you enable "Compress Objects Automatically"; it's not enabled by default and wasn't provided for a long time. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-gzip-compression-suppor... You'll save a lot on your bandwidth bill.

This is probably a better option than storing compressed data in S3 with a hard-coded Content-Encoding header, as it seems some web clients (like the Facebook app) display the raw gzip data.
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