AWS has Amplify Console which wraps up static site building, s3, cloudfront, custom domains, pull request previews, etc.
If you’re already on AWS I’d recommend giving it a shot.
Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
271–280 of 507 posts
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should warn that bike shedding about this distinction is absolutely not worth your time if you’re reading this and have less than like 100 blog posts written or are running a business on these sites (in which case I think you should pick Netlify). Go write something.
And also, who cares it's a static host and you can change to another one in an afternoon. There's zero lock-in when you're only rsyncing some files around. Just make sure you have total control over your DNS (buy a domain, put it on a good DNS host) and you really can't screw things up too badly.
Who would you consider good DNS hosts? I'm looking at setting up a static site and am new to the whole process
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#273AWS S3 + Cloudfront. The initial setup can be a little finicky, but once you do get it setup, the rest of the time you only do an S3 sync from your local dir to the S3 bucket. It will also be stupid fast (cloudfront is edge networks) + have ssl + it will not go down if you ever see a surge in traffic. I have several of these and they work beautifully. As far as cost goes: 12$/domain per year + 0.5$/month for route53…
> So it's under 2$/month for "enterprise grade"
Except that it isn't.
Only the domain, and to some extend, the S3 costs are the "fixed" cost that you can even predict at first. A surge in traffic will surely increase the egress data, and that is easily $0.05-0.10 per GB.
Cloudfront is one of the most expensive CDNs out there, and after 2-3 years of use, I came to realize how much I was wasting money on. CDNs often work quite flawlessly if you have a good cache busting mechanism, and I was paying a huge premium for what was essentially a set-once operation.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#274Hosting 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…
Don't a bunch of residential ISP's not allow HTTP?
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also, who cares it's a static host and you can change to another one in an afternoon. There's zero lock-in when you're only rsyncing some files around. Just make sure you have total control over your DNS (buy a domain, put it on a good DNS host) and you really can't screw things up too badly.
Who would you consider good DNS hosts? I'm looking at setting up a static site and am new to the whole process
Gandi.net is my favorite - their motto is "No BS" and I've found that to be true.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#276I use https://sdf.org , but then my needs are very modest...
Love to see projects like this still in existence. I sometimes wonder if I would get some users who could also share a box and keep it going for 30 years.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#277I'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…
Basically everything you wrote about GitHub Pages is wrong.
GitHub Pages is static hosting. If you don’t need Jekyll, don’t use it. There’s nothing special about it.
GitHub Pages does NOT charge for custom domains.
You can configure any branch for GitHub Pages, or even just the /docs folder on the main branch.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Github, yes. For anything else, you would have to use their rancher tool and Cloudflare KV store. I imagine they have plans to support other providers, but aren't quite there yet.
Seems like a great way to go, and if they implemented a Netlify CMS-like feature as well, that would really put it over the top as a unified one-stop shop for DNS/CDN/static site hosting + authoring built-in, and it also has Workers for any functions/dynamic pieces that might be needed.. all on Cloudflare's metal/edge. Sounds almost too good to be true..
Some people aren't fans of the built-in protection and feel it's a bit overzealous in throwing up catpchas to certain visitors. No CMS feature. I do like it quite a lot.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#279AWS S3 + Cloudfront. The initial setup can be a little finicky, but once you do get it setup, the rest of the time you only do an S3 sync from your local dir to the S3 bucket. It will also be stupid fast (cloudfront is edge networks) + have ssl + it will not go down if you ever see a surge in traffic. I have several of these and they work beautifully. As far as cost goes: 12$/domain per year + 0.5$/month for route53…
> So it's under 2$/month for "enterprise grade" Except that it isn't. Only the domain, and to some extend, the S3 costs are the "fixed" cost that you can even predict at first. A surge in traffic will surely increase the egress data, and that is easily $0.05-0.10 per GB. Cloudfront is one of the most expensive CDNs out there, and after 2-3 years of use, I came to realize how much I was wasting money on. CDNs often wo…
let’s talk numbers. how much egress traffic would you have?
at 10GB per month you pay 0.8$/month yes the traffic it costs extra, but a static website should not be GB (or even MB) in size. Also, if you have a lot of traffic you should learn how to control the caching aspect.
i would also challenge you to look at what egress traffic costs in other places.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#280Check out Vercel! [1] You can deploy for free, with a single command, in a few minutes. Disclaimer: I work at Vercel, happy to answer any questions. [1]: http://vercel.com/
I tried out vercel for the first time this week after Github pages failed to deploy an already built static site 30 mins before a demo. I took a gamble on vercel about 10 mins before I had to demo and it was running with a few minutes to spare, from starting sign up to having a live site - all free. I'm upgrading us today, because that was an exceptionally good experience. Thanks for making a simple product.