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Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

surge.sh

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Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#21

Post by pesfandiar »

Very nice. Services like this can help keep the costs and maintenance of smaller projects to a minimum. I myself created a proof-of-concept online programming judge without any server (see http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript-online-...). I only used Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare at virtually no cost.

I wish they had some minimal features that you'd need a server for. I'd pay $5-10/mo to get some basic authentication, custom headers, and maybe even some sort of user-specific key-value store.

Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#22

Post by windsurfer »

rakoo wrote: post #19
windsurfer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still confused what this service does. `surge -p build` and `npm install --save-dev surge` is simpler for a newbie than getting sftp credentials to a shared host? My designer friends can drag and drop, but certainly stay away from the console.

You'll need a shared host first. surge automatically gives you that.

Ah! That's really cool then! I thought it was just the command line tool.

Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#23

Post by juandazapata »

bennylope wrote: post #17
juandazapata wrote: post #8

Nice service, but too expensive to be honest. My static websites (built with middleman) are hosted in Amazon S3 as a static website bucket and have a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. I use `middleman s3_sync` to deploy the build in one command and it takes care of everything, even Cloudfront invalidation. All for just a few pennies per month. Anyway, keep up the good work.

I wouldn't be too quick to say it's too expensive. My set up is not dissimilar to your own. I'm comfortable working on the command line, using s3cmd to sync the site, modifying bucket policies, etc. Once you know those things - or if you enjoy learning them - it's all pretty trivial, but if you don't... well don't underestimate the hassle for someone who doesn't know this stuff. I'd think it a waste to pay $13/mo for…

I agree with you. It's just too expensive for me, maybe not for others.

In the end they are just tools, and you should use whatever fits you better.

Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#25

Post by cfjedimaster »

bennylope wrote: post #17
juandazapata wrote: post #8

Nice service, but too expensive to be honest. My static websites (built with middleman) are hosted in Amazon S3 as a static website bucket and have a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. I use `middleman s3_sync` to deploy the build in one command and it takes care of everything, even Cloudfront invalidation. All for just a few pennies per month. Anyway, keep up the good work.

I wouldn't be too quick to say it's too expensive. My set up is not dissimilar to your own. I'm comfortable working on the command line, using s3cmd to sync the site, modifying bucket policies, etc. Once you know those things - or if you enjoy learning them - it's all pretty trivial, but if you don't... well don't underestimate the hassle for someone who doesn't know this stuff. I'd think it a waste to pay $13/mo for…

Also remember that's 13 bucks to get custom SSL, redirects, etc. If you have simple pages w/o the need of https, it costs nothing.

Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#26

Post by bobfunk »

gk1 wrote: post #15

See also https://www.netlify.com/ ... Not sure on exact differences between the two, maybe someone who's used one or the other can chime in?

I'm a co-founder of netlify and happy to chime in.

Surge is a simple tool with a really awesome CLI for deploying static sites quickly.

At netlify we're building a larger platform for working with a modern static approach.

We have an integrated continuous deployment platform. That way you just link a git repository to netlify, and we'll do the build whenever you push to git and even give you preview deploys of pull requests.

We run our own content delivery network, which means a lot for performance, and can post-process assets to automatically serve them out of a larger asset CDN with far future expires headers.

Netlify has built in Let's Encrypt support with a 1 click setup. We'll do automatic certificate rotation and enable HTTP2 when HTTPS is turned on.

Our CDN can handle complex proxying and redirect rules. If part of your site need to go to a dynamic backend or if you need API proxying, a one-line rule can set this up. We can even handle gradual migrations from a dynamic to a static approach by proxying all non-static requests straight from the CDN to a dynamic origin.

Apart from that we have lots of extra features like built-in pre-rendering for single page apps, Geo IP based redirect and rewrite rules, JavaScript snippet injection for easy analytics setup, form processing, etc, etc...

Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#27

Post by macandcheese »

juandazapata wrote: post #8

Nice service, but too expensive to be honest. My static websites (built with middleman) are hosted in Amazon S3 as a static website bucket and have a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. I use `middleman s3_sync` to deploy the build in one command and it takes care of everything, even Cloudfront invalidation. All for just a few pennies per month. Anyway, keep up the good work.

Agree, Middleman + Middleman s3_sync is such an easy set up and deploy... Middleman project doesn't get enough love I think...

Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#28

Post by pyrophane »

One of the testimonials:

"From now on, I think I'm going to strive to build all my apps as fully static sites."

What? I can understand the idea of not overcomplicating an app when you don't need to, but how does this goal make sense for anyone who wants to build anything non-trivial?

Re: Surge – Static Web Publishing for Front-End Developers

#29

Post by Rabidgremlin »

Along similar lines I have been playing with Bitbucket Pipelines and Hugo to build static websites on commit and deploy them to S3 buckets. Really like the way they use docker containers as build agents, it's very tidy: https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3
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