Quick but important note: for those who don't know already, Volution sells a square space-esque managed site builder with hosting, which means this post does have a minor conflict of interest (although these days I guess it's called content marketing). Haven't seen it mentioned yet in the comments.
Static site hosting hurdles
51–60 of 183 posts
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#52It felt odd to see a doc this comprehensive on static site hosting with no mention of AWS S3/Cloudfront, given how easy it is to push content to an S3 bucket (either manually or via the CI pipeline of your choosing) and then serve it up either direct-from-S3 or via Cloudfront. But then it turns out that this is actually pushing folks towards some new paradigm of static cached HTTP responses instead of files. It pitch…
>We’ve already standardized the hosting side of static sites by using the file system. Worth noting that the incoming younger generations can't and don't into file systems.[1] Yes, anyone who wants to be a webmaster should do their homework, but that is besides the point. We are probably the last generation who can be ubiquitously assumed to have an understanding of files and folders/directories in a computer. [1]: h…
I think people in the web development space will continue to understand this concept. People who are curious will learn how the internals work.
For everyone else, who cares? Search is so good that it doesn’t matter where a file lives on your device. They don’t need to understand the internals of how directories work.
Good riddance! Even though people knew how to use files and folders no one did it well. It was a mess of “new directory” and “copy of copy of essay5.doc” I’m so thankful that most folks don’t have to deal with that anymore. They can use their computers instead of fighting them.
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#53I am currently using GitLab to do my static site hosting for free using their pages feature. And I get to use my own domain name and have SSL/https support automatically.
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#54It costs me about 1 dollar a month (never more than 2 dollars) to host my website.
I use:
- VuePress
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Certificate Manager
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Route53
For deployment:
- CircleCI
- s3deploy
It's a super simple (and cheap) setup. Just push a commit and the site gets updated.
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#55Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009. I think the industry (or part of a generation of programmers) somehow collectively forgot that it exists. I don't see any mention of it in the article -- it solves the problem exactly. It easily serves and survives all the spikes from Hacker News that my site gets. Shared host…
Nothing's wrong, it just gives much more than needed to serve a static site!
I like the idea to statically pre-generate entire HTTP responses, with all headers, and just serve a byte stream mindlessly once a URL is mapped. If TLS is handled by a separate proxy (that only does TLS termination), the "web server" becomes as trivial as it gets. Fast, simple, due to the simplicity probably bulletproof.
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#56Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009. I think the industry (or part of a generation of programmers) somehow collectively forgot that it exists. I don't see any mention of it in the article -- it solves the problem exactly. It easily serves and survives all the spikes from Hacker News that my site gets. Shared host…
Another DreamHost fan here. I host dozens of hybrid sites on both the shared hosting and VPS and the service is great. My setup is pretty simple, a Perl-based SSG which generates static HTML on-demand if it happens to be missing from the tree. I've had a few minor issues over the years, often self-inflicted, and whenever I use the support panel, I get a helpful human response within an couple of hours, usually with a…
Complete agree. Been DH customer since 2004.
Just wish they used newer hardware than they do on their VPS & Dedicated offering.
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is what Cloudflare Pages tries to solve You just connect your git repo and tell it what command to run to build your site and where the html output is
I really love Pages but for simple apps that are just PHP and MySQL - Pages doesn’t support that.
Well in that case it's not a static site any more.
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#58What's wrong with Netlify or Surge.sh?
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#59Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009. I think the industry (or part of a generation of programmers) somehow collectively forgot that it exists. I don't see any mention of it in the article -- it solves the problem exactly. It easily serves and survives all the spikes from Hacker News that my site gets. Shared host…
> what's wrong with shared hosting?
You answered that yourself:
> It costs less than $10/month
That’s a lot of dollars for a static website. There are a myriad of free options and there have been for years. Kinda disappointing that they weren’t mentioned. Anyone wanting to deploy a static website knows the big 4, completely free: Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, GitHub Pages.
Re: Static site hosting hurdles
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dreamhost is hugely underrated. Their custom panel with deep integrations are phenomenal for side projects or small businesses. In under a minute you can have your web server, SSL cert, database and more all setup and working - and you don’t have to manage any of it. I wish more companies offered their level of managed services. (If anyone knows of others, I’d like to hear who)
Is there anything really wrong with a CPanel host with FTP upload? Namecheap, Dreamhost, GoDaddy even (well maybe not them lol). There are a billion shared hosts everywhere and CPanel really isn't hard to use for HTTPS enabling or getting FTP locations to work with. ------ Bonus points: shove a random .php file in there and it probably will work if you need just a little bit of dynamic content.
>Is there anything really wrong with a CPanel host with FTP upload?
Nothing, other than that it's not cool with the kids because it's the grandpa's way of being a webmaster.
Personally, being an old school grump, I'll choose FTP upload over Git nonsense any day of the week because why in the nine seas of the seven hells do I need to sign up for Github, upload all my crap there, download-install and run a Git daemon, feed it my Github login credentials, let the daemon download and sync/compile/whatever the code I have there, and then probably run the whole contraption through sixty dozen frameworks of JavaShit to have a website?
I'll just fire up Filezilla or whatever is the trendy FTP client nowadays, punch in my login creds, upload my crap that I wrote up in Notepad++, maybe have some fun with PHP because I'm old school, and be done with it. :V