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Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

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Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#21

Post by 0x3f »

bradley_taunt wrote: post #17

This is pretty neat, but setups like this always make me wonder how the “static web” has become so complex? I feel that tossing your static files up on a host like NearlyFreeSpeech (or any other cheap/decent host) is the easiest. This would also only cost you ~$0.03 a day. Don’t reinvent the wheel, you know?

A lot of what the newer hosts provide is making your SPA or other JS framework app 'just work' without extra config. E.g. your build generates /index.html and the host will redirect all other paths to that file.

Also, if it's about cost then whatever cloud bucket plus CDN is going to be typically free and will scale to infinity for very cheap. Everyone dreams of a random blog post being on top of HN after all.

I suppose whether that's simpler depends on if you are familiar with the cloud offerings, but many people are through {dayjob}. For me, I'd rather use similar tooling for work and personal projects, so I don't have to think too much about it.

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#22

Post by chanux »

0x3f wrote: post #16
chanux wrote: post #14

Trifold looks simple! Also seems like a good reason to finally try out bunny.net For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/ I host this with GCP and stay within free tier And how I deploy a similar thing with GCS/Cloud build etc is covered here https://chanux.me/blog/post/automate-static-site-publishing-...

> For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/ This seems... incredibly complex when you could just use S3 + Cloudflare.

I agree that the initial setup is a bit complex. And at the time of writing, I could not find anything better. But once I set it up, it's quite friction-less and low maintenance so I didn't look further.

However, if you have pointer to a better solution, appreciate a link. Always looking to simplify.

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#23

Post by pwdisswordfishs »

chanux wrote: post #22
0x3f wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/ This seems... incredibly complex when you could just use S3 + Cloudflare.

I agree that the initial setup is a bit complex. And at the time of writing, I could not find anything better. But once I set it up, it's quite friction-less and low maintenance so I didn't look further. However, if you have pointer to a better solution, appreciate a link. Always looking to simplify.

[dead]

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#24

Post by 0x3f »

chanux wrote: post #22
0x3f wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/ This seems... incredibly complex when you could just use S3 + Cloudflare.

I agree that the initial setup is a bit complex. And at the time of writing, I could not find anything better. But once I set it up, it's quite friction-less and low maintenance so I didn't look further. However, if you have pointer to a better solution, appreciate a link. Always looking to simplify.

Not saying you should change it if it's working, and I don't have a ready-made tutorial, but assuming you only need to serve static files I would:

  (1) upload the files to an S3 bucket (GCS or Cloudflare R2 may also work, haven't tried);
  (2) point Cloudflare at the bucket via their Cloud Connector;
  (3) turn on Cloudflare Access.

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#25

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ozim wrote: post #12
Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

I throw everything I experiment with at Cloudflare, including my personal website and the family’s Internet stuff (websites, etc). None of them is commercial. Cloudflare tells me that it served 68.44 GB in the last 30 days, and the Invoice was ZERO. I’ve been looking for an extra-cheap CDN, and I’m not so worried about high uptime. I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront, though it…

Cloudflare transfer is inflated. I have personal website via CF that there is no way is having transfer amounts they claim there is.

Interesting! Do you have any suspicions as to where Cloudflare’s numbers are coming from?

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#26

Post by faizshah »

FYI if you want an s3 + CF analogue setup, b2 is integrated with bunny and allows private buckets: https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-bunny...

I haven’t yet worked out the best cheap VPS/dedicated provider though, project for next weekend.

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#27

Post by CrimsonCape »

Can someone ELI5 from the experience of hosting a static site, what is the next step beyond a static CDN?

I am guessing the next step is paying for a bucket that that allows virtualized containers to run an OS? Or having a constantly-up node.js backend to generate server-side HTML? Is this essentially the generic description of self-hosting Wordpress on an own server?

Does integrating a payment processor like Shopify require something more than static hosting?

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#28

Post by [deleted] »

chrismorgan wrote: post #19
Brajeshwar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Ha! I saw that from this article and signed up. I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit. Will be trying this out and also do a comparison with Cloudflare R2.

> I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit. I hadn’t heard of this, only seen the “14 day free trial” thing, so I checked: the trial gives $20 of credit, and verifying a card gets you $30 more, but it’s all trial credits which expires 14 days after you create your account. In other words, completely useless for people looking to spend under the $1/month minimum. Pity, free for 2½ years sounded good…

[deleted]

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#29

Post by blargwill »

ozim wrote: post #12
Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

I throw everything I experiment with at Cloudflare, including my personal website and the family’s Internet stuff (websites, etc). None of them is commercial. Cloudflare tells me that it served 68.44 GB in the last 30 days, and the Invoice was ZERO. I’ve been looking for an extra-cheap CDN, and I’m not so worried about high uptime. I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront, though it…

Cloudflare transfer is inflated. I have personal website via CF that there is no way is having transfer amounts they claim there is.

This is the first time I've read this but have personal experience similar. A few of my single page, gone nowhere, projects are seeing ~2k views a month. They're seeing zero traffic through google in that same period so no idea where it's coming from?

Re: Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

#30

Post by 0x3f »

CrimsonCape wrote: post #27

Can someone ELI5 from the experience of hosting a static site, what is the next step beyond a static CDN? I am guessing the next step is paying for a bucket that that allows virtualized containers to run an OS? Or having a constantly-up node.js backend to generate server-side HTML? Is this essentially the generic description of self-hosting Wordpress on an own server? Does integrating a payment processor like Shopify…

Next step in which dimension?

There is what modern JS world calls 'SSR' (server-side rendering) which is where, yes, you basically have a node server running to generate the HTML that is sent to the browser and that's then 'hydrated' into a client-side app. Doesn't necessarily have to be Node/JS though, other languages have their own frameworks, but JS is probably most common. This setup can then be fronted by a CDN for caching purposes.

That's not really related to the bucket concept though, it just runs on a normal server and serves everything (static and dynamic content), typically.

IMO the benefits of SSR (vs SSG or a pure static-file site) are marginal _unless_ you have a very specific use case. E.g. an ecommerce site where you want all your product pages to have great SEO, but you've got too many products to build them all at once.

Then again if you _only_ need a website (i.e. no API for other clients) then it can be nice to have end-to-end types in that kind of fullstack setup.

> Does integrating a payment processor like Shopify require something more than static hosting?

I don't know about Shopify but for e.g. Stripe you can do a lot on their hosted pages, without your own backend. If you want to automate things though, have user state based on payments, etc you will need a backend and a data store of some kind. But that could be an API that your static site points to.

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