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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?

#371

Post by chriswarbo »

busymom0 wrote: post #345
deepspace wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for pointing out this blog post. I used NFS for many years but moved away a while ago for opportunistic reasons. However, after reading that post, I will make every effort to go back to them. "Freedom of speech" does not include hate speech or racist speech or any speech advocating against a group of people in my worldview, and I therefore agree 100% with NFS's stance. All freedoms have limits, agreed to by…

Politically incorrect things get labelled "racist" now a days. I, as a brown immigrant, get to criticize my home country all I want. I can call my home country corrupt, filthy, polluted, no regards for women rights, gay rights, caste system, rapes etc and be totally okay as long as the other person knows I am brown. But suddenly if a white person or someone with the wrong "political affilitation" says the same things…

> I, as a brown immigrant, get to criticize my home country all I want.

Countries are not people, so criticism of a country cannot be racist (it's a category error).

Criticism of people of a country could be racist, but that's a different thing.

Criticism of the government/establishment of a country could be racist, but again that's a different thing.

Unfortunately these three separate things often get conflated and mixed up.

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

#372

Post by dominikstr »

jjacobson93 wrote: post #307
tdhttt wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

I just use a script on a cron that runs every 15 minutes and updates my DNS provider. And for let’s encrypt, I use the DNS verification method so you don’t have to even expose HTTP(S) ports if you don’t need to

I wrote a small go app[0] which is invoked every 15 minutes and updates the DNS through the cloudflare API. Its very specific for my use case and ISP but works well.

[0] https://gitlab.com/dominikstraessle/homelab-dns

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

#373

Post by danielheath »

rantwasp wrote: post #279
Ayesh wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For $work I reduced our cloudfront egress bill by over $2000 / month by putting cloudflare in front of cloudfront.

For a side project I likely wouldn't bother, but the pricing differential is really damn steep.

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

#374

Post by singhrac »

heyoni wrote: post #333
hellojason wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here. Not sure where they’re getting that from. Possibly region specific?

I replied upthread, but I made a mistake reading https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/... when revisiting what I remembered, and I was just looking at it from the perspective of private repos. My bad!

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

#375

Post by srg0 »

I pay $3/month for a VPS. Probably not the cheapest way to host, and not the smallest vps offered, but I like that I can just ssh into it and do whatever I want, if/when I want something more than nginx, or I want to configure it in a very particular way (both things did happen). The drawback is that running apt upgrade is on me.

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

#376

Post by iamacyborg »

busymom0 wrote: post #359
cauthon wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as a succinct and derisive dismissal of white supremacist beliefs, particularly racial purity.

Anyone who refers to people as "mayonnaise" and "curry" are racist themselves.

Won’t someone please think of the white people

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

#377

Post by stevage »

I use site44.

It's ridiculously easy. It's a front-end to Dropbox, so if you're already doing this, it's basically:

Sign up, chose "mycrapsite.site44.com"

cp -pr deployedsite/* ~/Dropbox/Apps/mycrapsite.site44.com

Now your site is on the web.

Nothing else is as easy as that. Super convenient for a lot of times when you just need a few files accessible via the web for some reason, too - no need to use any web interfaces, just copy on the command line, and done.

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

#378

Post by stevage »

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…

>Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying.

You don't need that anymore. You can run Github Pages out of a branch like /docs, which makes life much simpler. That's how I run most of my sites.

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

#379

Post by BrandoElFollito »

mtlynch wrote: post #268
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if you get hit by a DDoS. The fact that you cannot put a cap on your spending is infuriating (the official AWS answer is "we do not want to break your business" (even if I want to)). To be fair, some complaining or crying in such cases usually gets your bill reversed.

You don't mean literally distributed denial of service attack, right? It's super easy to keep serving a static resource, so I think you'd need a huge amount of traffic to put a dent in Firebase's static hosting capacity. I've had spikes of up to 300k visitors to my Firebase blog in a month, and the bill was like $150. It seems hard to get bitten by huge surprise costs from a blog on Firebase static hosting, even if s…

> so I think you'd need a huge amount of traffic to put a dent in Firebase's static hosting capacity.

No, I was referring to your bill, when your resource usage spikes (really spikes, as in sustained Gbps+ traffic spikes). Many people were taken aback by the unexpected bills.

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

#380

Post by stevage »

singhrac wrote: post #366
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.

I think we've both said correct things, but I think you've missed my meaning: yes, I understand that Github Pages is static hosting, I was point out that by default the build system uses Jekyll. This is nonobvious. This is in the docs: "GitHub Pages will use Jekyll to build your site by default. If you want to use a static site generator other than Jekyll, disable the Jekyll build process by creating an empty file ca…

I don't use Jekyll and I have never set up a .nojekyll file. I don't know what that is meant to do, but you can deploy whatever you want and it will work just fine.

Maybe you need that file on the rare offchance that you're deploying a site that contains something that looks like a Jekyll config, but you don't want it to be built that way.

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