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

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251–260 of 507 posts

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

#251
I use

    git push
and that deploys my static site, which I think counts as "Heroku but even easier".

For this to work, in the bare repo I push to, over ssh, the post-update hook automatically pulls into a non-bare repo:

    #!/bin/sh
    set -e

    echo -n 'updating... '
    git update-server-info
    echo 'done. going to foo'
    cd /home/bar/public_html/absolute/path/of/a/non/bare/clone
    echo -n 'pulling... '
    env -u GIT_DIR git pull
    echo -n 'updating... '
    env -u GIT_DIR git update-server-info
    echo 'done.'
You can use rsync too, but I think Git is substantially better for this kind of thing.

Now of course this assumes that you already have a server machine somewhere, which you can ssh into, which is running a web server, and which is already in DNS. I've been in that situation for 26 years now, except that at first I used telnet. So I kind of take it for granted.

It sounds like maybe you're looking for a way to not run your own web server process, instead sharing the burden with other people, like a PHP shared host from 15 years ago. If that's what you want, maybe you should share the server with a few friends? Like, two to eight? That way you don't have to give up the ability to solve whatever problems come up with the server.

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

#252

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…

There is a strong chance that when Pages comes out of beta, Worker Sites is going to be transitioned into Pages, at least thats kind of how I feel about some of the verbiage on this page:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/migrations/migrating...

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

#255

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…

Would your ranking change if you assumed you'd be running Jekyll and deploying to Github pages?

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

#257

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…

Cloudflare wouldn't work well for me. Filling a captcha everytime to have a page load is stupid.

I know what I do to get that prompt (ahem porn), I can’t imagine what does it on every page load.

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

#258

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 actually just went the other way. I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures, and the page would not work sometimes in Safari with default settings. The default setup for GH Pages is not great. Jekyll is very dated. But if you use GH Actions, you can build yourself a pretty great setup. My site is open source at https://github.com/jacobp100/jacob-does-code - there's also a blog post about how the bu…

Safari + IPv6 = find out a lot about crosswalks and stoplights.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare wouldn't work well for me. Filling a captcha everytime to have a page load is stupid.

I know what I do to get that prompt (ahem porn), I can’t imagine what does it on every page load.

IPv6 and aggressive anti third party cookies seem to trigger it pretty well.

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

#260
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'll go one step further: were it not for self-hosting since the early 2000s, I probably wouldn't have a career. My first "server" was a Pentium laptop with no screen. Now I run thousands of servers for a company you've probably heard of.

I’m going to believe those thousands of sites are still on the Pentium laptop.

https://xkcd.com/908/

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