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

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221–230 of 507 posts

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

#221

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, y…

How do you know that Netlify is production ready? I found Netlify Identity to not be production ready* and now I'm not so sure about the rest of the platform.

* Three reasons. 1) The identity widget has people setting it up in such a way that tokens aren't refreshed and logins last only an hour. https://github.com/netlify/netlify-identity-widget/issues/11... 2) Netlify Identity keeps bumping me out despite having gone out of my way to get it configured properly. I don't know why but the issue has lasted for weeks. 3) In development mode, the token can't be verified without making a request to Netlify Functions, and the suggested path (in Redwood.js at least) is to just parse the JWT without verifying it.

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

#222
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, if his monthly bill is 83 cents, and he values his time? Does not using a CDN impact performance in a crippling way that neither me nor the poster you're replying to understands?

It takes like 30 seconds to point a Cloudfront distribution at an S3 bucket. Maybe a couple minutes more to set up the domain.

Eh, only if you've done it before. If it's your first time, it can easily take 30 mins to an hour, if you also have to figure out how to host the website on Route 53.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are "Dynamic DNS" services (a good free one used to be DynDNS in the 00's) that will take an API call from your home system and update a DNS with it. Many routers have support for this and if your router runs dhcpcd you can tell it to issue the call when it renews the DHCP lease from your ISP, or simply cron job it.

From my experience most ISPs don't give publicly routable addresses anymore, just throwing everybody behind CGNAT (currently I pay extra 3$ monthly fee for static routable IP, but not all providers offer it). And IPv6 is usually still not deployed.

As the other comment says, I've never seen CGNAT in the US. I'm sure it's deployed in some cases, but I've never had to deal with it.

I'm confused about it though. For some applications and games you need to connect peer-to-peer for them to work correctly. How is it possible to connect to a peer with some random port open (e.g. 48295)? It doesn't seem like the ISP could know that the request was aimed at you, if something like UPnP isn't being used. Or does CGNAT simply disable all incoming connections, breaking p2p applications entirely?

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

#226
post #28

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 thin…

NSFN are also a great registrar for those who host elsewhere. I found them way back when GoDaddy was in the news for pulling domains at News Corp's behest when I decided I wanted a registrar that wouldn't do that :)

https://mashable.com/2007/01/25/myspace-godaddy/

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

#227
I’ll second the use of GitLab pages - free hosting, free letsencrypt cert, only pay for your domain, very easy setup.

Here’s my setup with Zola: https://seanharrison.org/postgrails/20200523-got-zola/

A couple notes about setting up DNS since the gitlab instructions weren’t 100% clear to me: https://seanharrison.org/postgrails/20200720-gitlab-pages-dn...

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

#229
post #222
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes like 30 seconds to point a Cloudfront distribution at an S3 bucket. Maybe a couple minutes more to set up the domain.

Eh, only if you've done it before. If it's your first time, it can easily take 30 mins to an hour, if you also have to figure out how to host the website on Route 53.

Well, sure, but every suggestion is going to take some time if you've never done it before. It's not like it's an obscure skill that you'll never use, it's pretty handy to know.

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

#230
post #219

Hosting a personal blog on old / cheap hardware at home and accepting some downtime now and then should be a trade-of worth making for most. An interconnected web of documents served from personal computers residing under a desk or in a basement – it is a beautiful thing. We nerds often seem to fall into the trap of over-engineering things, like, spending a lot of time building personal stuff that can scale into the…

I am doing this and it's fun! The only hassles I had are a. setting up DDNS (since I don't have a static IP) and b. getting a certificate from Let's encrypt with only port 443 open (80 is blocked by my ISP). But other than that, it has been great! Hopefully my ISP won't have a problem with that ;)
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