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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?

#291

Post by sedachv »

jacobp100 wrote: post #163
singhrac wrote: post #130

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…

> I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures

As someone who does a lot of browsing with unpopular web browsers, Cloudflare is basically a way to ensure that it is a coin toss as to whether or not I will see your site; it is not the worst CDN/DoS protection racket service out there though. I would like to see how much legitimate traffic Cloudflare or the others block, and how much website operators are spending on that "service."

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

#292

Post by dcchambers »

If all you really need is static web hosting there's several "good enough" or even "really good" free options these days, and many of them have insane reliability/uptime and can even build your site/blog for you. Many of them can be set up to deploy automatically when you commit to a repo.

- GitHub Pages and Netlify are the two obvious and most popular choices, but there's also cloudflare, gitlab pages, hell even Keybase has static website hosting: https://book.keybase.io/sites

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

#293

Post by qbasic_forever »

thitcanh wrote: post #277
singhrac wrote: post #130

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…

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.

Just as a clarification, much of what you mention has only changed in the last year or so. For a very long time gh-pages branch and Jekyll were assumed (you couldn't even use plugins with Jekyll). Custom domains weren't free. SSL wasn't free. Github is doing great stuff but it has taken time to evolve into the all free all you can eat buffet you see today.

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

#294

Post by mygo »

singhrac wrote: post #130

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…

Re: Github Pages

- I've got several sites on gh-pages with custom domains and pay exactly $0

- I don't use Jekyll, I literally just `git push` a static repo

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

#297

Post by hellojason »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #293
thitcanh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just as a clarification, much of what you mention has only changed in the last year or so. For a very long time gh-pages branch and Jekyll were assumed (you couldn't even use plugins with Jekyll). Custom domains weren't free. SSL wasn't free. Github is doing great stuff but it has taken time to evolve into the all free all you can eat buffet you see today.

I have to agree with parent. I've had a custom domain without Jekyll on GitHub pages for well over 5 years now, and it's been free the entire time.

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

#298

Post by justinclift »

singhrac wrote: post #130

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…

One pretty huge downside for GitHub Pages, is that they still don't seem to serve content to IPv6 addresses.

Saying that because I tried it out again a few weeks ago for a friend's website (https://neasair.org), and nope... it doesn't provide AAAA DNS records (IPv6), just A (IPv4).

So, had to put the website on some other infrastructure already hanging around, that does do AAAA records.

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

#299

Post by da39a3ee »

sevencolors wrote: post #202
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #21

https://render.com (lead by early Stripe infra employee!)

Yeah loving their setup. Very Heroku-like. Free for static hosts and almost as cheap as Digital Ocean for servers

I'm using them for a rust rocket site, and about to for a django/vue thing. It's extremely slick and easy to get going. But they are just personal projects. I haven't thought about whether it would be suitable for a prod deploy, or how I'd do something like take django down while database migrations are running on deploy.

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

#300

Post by dn3500 »

messo wrote: 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…

It's been getting more difficult to host any kind of services at home. My current home internet service is behind triple NAT.
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