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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?

#444
I’m just pushing out rendered HTML to Azure Storage fronted by CloudFlare (the Static Web Sites feature takes index.html and 404.html and just works).

Rendering (which is custom and optimized for minimal delta updates) is done on a tiny VM that hosts other services, triggered by a GitHub hook.

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

#445

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 used to host my site on GitHub but switched to Gitlab pages which doesn't require a special branch or extra finesse. I love it, it's really easy for me to add new posts.

Gitlab pages has an option to look at the /build folder for web pages to serve up. So as long as that folder is in the .gitignore, my Gitlab ci just runs `hugo` to build the site which then gets served up.

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

#448
post #28

I 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 have used nfshost for hosting multiple sites for over a decade. They're a fantastic service that's simple, secure, and provides great, fast support. They recently published this blog post: https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2021/01/19/free-speech-in-... After reading this, I made the decision to move my hosting elsewhere. I have never hosted content that is even remotely political, and have no intention to do so. I…

It's interesting how free speech is being interpreted and abused for hate speech so often. This isn't as much of a thing in German speaking areas, where it is called freie Meinungsäußerung.

Frei ... Free Meinung ... Opinion Äußerung ... Utterance

It's the freedom of voicing opinions, not any speech even if it incentivises hate crime.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2000$ is a lot of traffic. way more than any side project would have.

I guess that if you are at a point where you are making decisions like you needed to you are out of the “easiest way to setup a static website” territory.

I would be curious what kind of content you were serving and how much traffic/what are the absolute $ numbers cloudfront vs cloudflare.

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

#450
I host a bunch of static websites created using Gatsby, Hugo and Mkdocs.

The downright easiest and cheapest (free) platform I find is AWS Amplify Console. It's simply too good to be true (no affiliation).

Connects with repos on all platforms (bitbucket, gitlab, GitHub). Push to deploy. Most of my sites are still on the free tier.

If you manage your DNS with Route53, you don't even have to configure subdomains anymore, every new site's domain is automatically configured with a click.

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