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

I guess cheap and easy are opposite directions in a way, but if you are totally static, I guess a Digital-Ocean instance isn't too difficult, with some leeway to improve the response-time over time; Just slap a Nginx or something on it, serve up the statics, and maybe establish a way to upload stuff (scp?), Just keep hold of backups (docker images, configs/dotfiles, and actual content), put good protection on the droplets (they are targets for hacking).

The benefit is that it's just a linux distro of your choice, so you can use whatever you are familiar with, and there is scope to add non-static service if needs be.

If you use Fastmail, it comes with static website hosting included

This. I can warmly recommend AWS Amplify for hosting static sites. Very convenient and easy to set up.

I use https://nearlyfreespeech.net for my static site.

It isn't free -- it is pretty cheap -- but it has a lot going for it. It requires no custom tooling -- I upload via rsync. This makes it trivial to migrate to a new provider if necessary.

I develop my site locally, then rsync it up. I have a custom domain pointed at the site, and also a custom .htaccess, so I have a good amount of control over the site. I do things like serve html without the .html filetype in the url; e.g. https://zck.org/emacsconf2020 is stored on the server as emacsconf2020.html . (I do this so Emacs recognizes the files as html, but keeps the urls clean).

It's a nice tool if you want to get a little involved in your setup, without getting wrapped up in proprietary tooling. It does charge for what you use, so it's not a great site if you are going to host Blu-ray images that get downloaded from everyone on HN.

You could host it P2P in Peergos - https://peergos.org/posts/p2p-web-hosting

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder