Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by 29083011397778 » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

warent wrote: post #117

Symbiote wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The in-between days (after dial-up ISPs, but before "cloud" meant people forgot they could do things themselves) was to host the website on your own computer. For example, an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or an always-on-anyway desktop. I host my personal site this way. I also host about 100 mostly-static mostly-low-use websites at work similarly: with Apache on a couple of VMs. They are more reliable than the free ver…

I'm not sure how you do this unless you have a static IP somehow? In my experience ISPs don't offer that to residential clients

They don't, but my ISP-provided modem/router combo has built-in integration with a dynamcic DNS service. If your domain name follows whatever your IP is, it's close enough to static (at least for my uses)

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

#122

Post by rabbitsfoot8 » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

I created https://tiiny.host - might be exactly what you're looking for. Command line tool coming soon!

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

#123

Post by subpixel » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

ptk921 wrote: post #10

I continue to be a big fan of surge [1]. A number of toy projects/demos of mine have been developed using create-react-app, rendered to static files, then deployed via surge. [1] = https://surge.sh/

Git project? Netlify. Not a git project? Surge!

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

#124

Post by fishtoaster » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

A while back I wrote a tool* to make this as easy as possible for my use case: a single command to register the domain, jump through all the AWS hoops, and have a live static site with ssl at the end. I was pretty happy with it.

These days, though, I just use netlify. It's not quite one command, but it's about heroku-level easy, and it gives you a lot of little niceties (autodeploy whenever you push a specific git branch to github, ssl, etc).

* https://github.com/kkuchta/scarr

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

#125

Post by serial_dev » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

Sodman wrote: post #96

ducharmdev wrote: post #19

GitHub Pages or Netlify for sure. With either of these options, your static site can be set up to deploy whenever there's new commits to the specified branch. Me and a friend mentor for Code Louisville, and we're able to get the beginner frontend students up and running very quickly using these options - they're free and much easier to use.

I see the "GitHub Pages" suggested a lot whenever this question comes up, but it's worth noting that it's against their ToS[0] to use it for commercial purposes: "GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial softwar…

Anyone got issues with this?

In my opinion, there are some cases where it is a gray area: professional portfolio, case studies website with an email collection form, blog posts where you mention that you are a freelancer, a site where you link to your YouTube videos, some simple JavaScript app that don't require a backend but might make some money with ads...

So I'm just wondering how often they strike down at people who operate in this gray area.

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

#126

Post by _wldu » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

Hugo, nearly free speech and a Makefile.

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

#127

Post by emptysongglass » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

ianopolous wrote: post #30

You could host it P2P in Peergos - https://peergos.org/posts/p2p-web-hosting Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder

I tried but you have a waiting list.

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

#128

Post by calderarrow » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

Vercel. Sign in with Github, push and it's deployed. Probably the best Developer Experience I've ever had.

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

#129

Post by speedgoose » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

crazypython wrote: post #83

philistine wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big gain with putting Cloudfront in front of it is you can have HTTPS.

HTTPS gets you better SEO and the ability to be iframe'd from HTTPS sites.

And some security.

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

#130

Post by singhrac » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

I've tried Github pages, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages. Moved last night to the latter.

Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying. It's fairly clear (for obvious reasons) that they mainly think about Jekyll users, though I had a Hugo blog there for a while.

Netlify sounds great, but in practice I ran into an annoying issue that I couldn't resolve where I had to rerun every automatic build. This probably isn't really their fault but the forums didn't work.

Cloudflare Pages kind of just worked out of the box, and since I was already using it for my DNS, changing where the domain pointed took a few seconds.

I'd suspect, if you corrected for how many issues were particular to me, I'd say Cloudflare Pages ~ Netlify > Github Pages. I'm kind of surprised the latter charges you for custom domains; I do have to say there's more documentation for Github than any of the others.