Vercel has a free tier.
Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
321–330 of 507 posts
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#322Check 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/
Your pricing page is confusing to me. There is a free tier, and it says "Pay as you grow", but I can't see what the limits on the free tier are or how growth is measured. How does it work?
Literally a 3 second google would have answered that question for you: https://vercel.com/docs/platform/limits
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#323I 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…
I'm pretty fond of them, but their service charges for support gradually add up if you have many sites there. I'm moving some items to a $5 VPS.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#324Earlier 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.
Get your facts straight, they have had custom domains for a looong time & there was absolutely no need for Jekyll either at any point to host a page, it just happened to be one the most documented/blogged about way to use GitHub pages with automatic builds instead of having static content.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is something that is configurable though. If you leave your Firewall security mode to default, then yes it will block IPs with bad rep. If I don't care about anti-ddos, I just set the Firewall security to Low, and create a Firewall rule to allow everything from 0.0.0.0/0, simple as that.
Good to know that about Cloudflare. Believe it or not, there is at least one DoS protection provider/Web Application Firewall service/whatever you want to call it, that seems to default to asking you to solve captchas to view web pages.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#326Check 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/
Your pricing page is confusing to me. There is a free tier, and it says "Pay as you grow", but I can't see what the limits on the free tier are or how growth is measured. How does it work?
The paid plans let you deploy more often, has longer timeouts, and lets you have team members. Also, hobby plans are limited to personal, non-commercial use. https://vercel.com/docs/platform/limits
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#327I'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…
Get your facts straight, they have had custom domains for a looong time & there was absolutely no need for Jekyll either at any point to host a page, it just happened to be one the most documented/blogged about way to use GitHub pages with automatic builds instead of having static content.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#328I'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 had cloudflare set up on a mediawiki site until last year when for some reason I disabled it and discovered that a lot of issues I'd had accessing the site in Safari went away (like it not letting me login except in private browsing).
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#329I'm still on HostGator for my smaller sites. I have a DreamHost account, but it's a logger for something, not a publicly visible site.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Get your facts straight, they have had custom domains for a looong time & there was absolutely no need for Jekyll either at any point to host a page, it just happened to be one the most documented/blogged about way to use GitHub pages with automatic builds instead of having static content.
Free SSL for custom domains happened a few years ago: https://github.blog/2018-05-01-github-pages-custom-domains-h...