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

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

#141
post #55

I have my site in an S3 bucket with the static-site flag activated. It would not win for 'easiest'. However, it's the only thing in my personal AWS account right now and my monthly bill is $0.83

Cheapest however, is out the window.

I mean, if there's a chance, however remote, that you might end up as the #1 of reddit or whatever, stay away from S3. Your site won't go down, but oh god, you pay for that.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An S3 bucket is intended as storage, not retrieval. Downloading from S3 means grabbing shards. You should put a proper CDN, like CloudFront or Cloudflare, in front.

Pfffffft. It’s probably a personal site with 10 visitors a week. Let’s step back a little here.

Let's be real here.

He clearly needs kubernetes.

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

#143

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 buil…

gitlab pages is better imo. You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files.

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

#145
surge.sh is quite nice, mainly because you just run the command from your “dist” directory, press enter a couple of times, and it’s uploaded.

If you want a more CI type service (i.e. you push your code and it builds on the cloud, rather than you build it locally - or it requires no build), I’ve found Netlify pretty good.

Was using Vercel for a Next.js project recently, quite nice experience but it randomly started timing out about 50% of builds and their support were unwilling to help without a minimal repro - fair enough, but I was on a deadline so switched to Netlify, which built the site with no issues.

Will try out Cloudflare Pages next based on the positive comments in here!

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

#146

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 buil…

I use both pages.dev and netlify.com: pages.dev, even in open beta, is a fantastic product if it suits all your needs, but the limitations [0], if you hit them, are a dead-end and there are no ETAs as to when some of those limitations would be addressed.

That is not the case with netlify.com which boasts a myriad of features, is equally as fast, production-ready, and competitively priced.

With pages.dev, I believe, you pay per every domain you host, whilst with netlify.com, there's no cap on number of domains per account, though they do charge for bandwidth (unlike pages.dev).

Workers Sites [1] is a viable alternative and I quite prefer it over pages.dev.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites

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

#147
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Alternatively, you can use cron/systemd timers to update the domain minutely.

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

#148
post #89
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I discovered Netlify through Netlify CMS. I had a pretty bad opinion about Netlify CMS, so I was pretty sure Netlify was going to be at least as bad. Damn, I have never been so wrong: - the interface is so intuitive I never opened the documentation - this is FAST (the bottleneck to see my website live is now my browser cache) - no need to create a Github Actions pipeline to deploy, just say "hey, my repo is here" - a…

My favorite feature is automatic deployment of pull requests. I love it, and I wish there was something as cheap and easy for backend services as well. Though I guess it's not too necessary if you implement testing properly :p

Heroku has offered branch previews for a while now

Edit: they call it Review Apps (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-rev...)

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And loose 30 mins of your life you’ll never get back. It’s just a person site.

Browsers will light up like a christmas tree if your site doesn't have https.

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

#150

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 buil…

Haven't tried Netlify or Cloudfare pages, but I use GH pages for my personal blog (running Jekyll) and I've never seen any reason to switch. You need to know how to use Git and Github, but since you're reading HN you probably know these things. It's really convenient to be able to just push to GH and have it auto-deploy - and it's free.

Granted, my blog is an insignifcant site with a tiny readership and I rarely update it, so if you need something more heavy duty than I have no idea if GH pages is up to the task.

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