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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

#71
post #66
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`(ノಥ,_」ಥ)ノ彡┻━┻`

The deploy process is much easier for me to manage on GitHub Pages, because I can just do "rake publish" and middleman-gh-pages deploys the site. Neither I nor my collaborators have to deal with the details of deploying. Surge makes you remember to call the surge command with the proper arguments and have collaborators also have surge accounts set up properly. Maybe there's a way to have a GitHub webhook automaticall…

You could set up a Travis CI job to build and deploy the site on every push.

https://surge.sh/help/integrating-with-travis-ci

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

#73
post #53

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.

Hi, Brock from surge.sh here. We are still figuring out our pricing. It kind of kills me to hear someone call surge too expensive. We worked hard to give surge a very legit free offering which is serving over 35k projects. Surge gives (currently) unlimited projects with custom domains. We charge $13/mo for that extra 1% which is custom SSL, basic auth, custom redirects. Very open to suggestions if you have any. Would…

$13/mo is pretty good for people with premium requirements (as you said, the 1%) in my opinion.

Though, I feel a psychological bias for paying upwards of 10 USD for services, since there are so many of them. I feel comfortable paying 9.77 USD for Netflix (India), but 12.6 USD tier just feels expensive.

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

#74
post #54

I mean, if you're doing a static site you can also use github pages with a simple push command. Is there some difference between surge and doing this that I'm not seeing?

If you are properly preparing your assets for web distribution you really don't want those files in a git repo. it messes up your commit history and doesn't provide much value. I think gh-pages is fundamentally broken for this reason. IMHO its best to keep your source files in a git repo and publish your compiled assets to surge.

It's a common work-flow to have your stable/prod/dist/build in a separate branch, just like gh-pages is.

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

#75
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered Gitlab, which does advertise custom domains for which you can upload your own SSL certs? Even at the free plan level. I would switch to it if not for the fact that my site isn't dealing with any kind of sensitive stuff so I figured Github Pages with Cloudflare's SSL was enough, although I'm aware its not end-to-end.

I couldn't get CloudFlare's SSL to work with GitHub Pages when I tried it because of some DNS issues. Do you have that working?

I think your sites need to be "on" cloudflare (i.e., the cloud icon in the DNS settings page needs to be orange and not grey) for other features like SSL and Page Rules to work. Specifically for Github Pages I configured both my apex custom domain and my www subdomain to point to myusername.github.io. Cloudflare will automatically follow myusername.github.io and return the origin IP when requests are made to the apex custom domain, something they call CNAME flattening, and similar to the ALIAS and ANAME records offered by other DNS providers. Plus I set SSL as "Full" but NOT "Full(Strict)" as the latter won't work with Github Pages' servers. There are some anecdotal reports I've read saying that for some Github Pages sites even Full SSL doesn't work, so if that's the case you can try Flexible SSL which should work in all cases. And of course as the other responder said, don't forget to redirect all your http requests to https using a Page Rule along the lines of http://*mydomain.com/* --> 301 redirect --> https://[www].mydomain.com/$2

Hope that helps.

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

#76
post #53

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.

Hi, Brock from surge.sh here. We are still figuring out our pricing. It kind of kills me to hear someone call surge too expensive. We worked hard to give surge a very legit free offering which is serving over 35k projects. Surge gives (currently) unlimited projects with custom domains. We charge $13/mo for that extra 1% which is custom SSL, basic auth, custom redirects. Very open to suggestions if you have any. Would…

We use surge.sh to host our production app for our customers, and have been very happy except for one bout of downtime which was very frustrating.

I have no objection to paying 13$/mo if surge would implement some premium redundancy features. Cloudflare already gives me the SSL I need, and 13$/mo for custom redirects isn't really worthwhile for me when I can just use hash-based history for our app.

Basically I think you guys have the pricing worked out incorrectly, at least for our use-case. Avoiding downtime is the #1 reason I would pay someone else to host something for me (because tbh I can just write an ansible script to deploy my code to nginx running on Digital Ocean if I wanted to maintain it myself).

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

#77

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

Nice one! I'm a developer from Atlassian, it's cool to see the different CI/CD applications that Pipelines is being used for. Regarding static site deployment specifically, Aerobatic ( https://www.aerobatic.com/ ) have a similar static site publishing offering via a Bitbucket add-on, though it uses Lambda rather than Pipelines. They've got a couple of other nifty features like auto-renewing SSL certificates, too.

Nice tip!

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

#78
post #53

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.

Hi, Brock from surge.sh here. We are still figuring out our pricing. It kind of kills me to hear someone call surge too expensive. We worked hard to give surge a very legit free offering which is serving over 35k projects. Surge gives (currently) unlimited projects with custom domains. We charge $13/mo for that extra 1% which is custom SSL, basic auth, custom redirects. Very open to suggestions if you have any. Would…

It's too expensive when you have multiple small static websites. I could host several of those on one DO droplet for $10/month, but with surge it will cost me $40+/month for 3+ projects (I do want SSL for my custom domain).

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

#79
post #69
post #34

Another interesting competitor is PubStorm https://www.pubstorm.com/ Their price is TBD, but they have a cool "quick and easy revert" feature.

I came to mention PubStorm which I started using recently and have been pleased so far. I got the impression that some reasonable service would remain free? Hoe does Surge compare?

Sorry, yes they both have a free offering.

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

#80
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up on Middleman when I couldn't get anyone in various Ruby mailing lists and IRC channels to advise me how to stop Middleman deleting directories which aren't mirrored in the src directory. Jekyll has the keep_files: [] config option.

I had that same issue. But then I just mirrored them in the src directory and it was fine.

That's not practical when you have a massive images directory. A decent framework should have the equivalent of Jekyll's keep_files:
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