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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?

#211

Post by londons_explore »

jacobp100 wrote: post #163
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…

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…

Usually when I need static site hosting, I don't want to build myself a great setup - I want to click a few buttons and have a great setup.

Third party free hosting excels at the ability to do a start to finish page in inside an hour. I want to spend 55 minutes of that hour writing the text, not fiddling with oddities of how to make GitHub actions show me the parse errors of my markdown...

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

#212

Post by jedbrown »

foobar33333 wrote: post #143
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…

gitlab pages is better imo. You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files.

Notably, it's easy to make a review site that integrates with a merge request so you can see it before deploying and get visual reviews any time you have multiple stakeholders. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/

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

#213

Post by poopsmithe »

pwdisswordfish6 wrote: post #158
Bender wrote: post #3

If you mean pure html/css, then the least friction would be NeoCities [1] It is free and not owned by Microsoft or Google. [1] - https://neocities.org/

You are limited to one *.neocities.org site, otherwise it's $60 per year.

I have unlimited neocities subdomains and pay $0 a year. I must be on a discontinued plan, but at one time there was a $100 lifetime offer.

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

#215

Post by VPenkov »

villasv wrote: post #152
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 can, it's just very convoluted. You can set up billing alarms and use alarms as triggers for actions.

One of those stories that get posted every other month about "How I racked up $xx000 bill for Firebase" explained that they had billing alarms but they weren't exactly real time.

Also, you might be the main/only site administrator, in which case falling asleep might end up badly for you.

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

#217

Post by waiseristy »

13415 wrote: post #194

Raspberry Pi 4, if you live in a country where ISPs actually offer you Internet rather than just download access.

This IMO is a bad bad bad idea. If you host PII on the site, any site you visit will be able to just ping your ip's port 80 and figure out who you are. This exact setup lead to the 2012 LinkedIn hack

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

#218

Post by waiseristy »

lawwantsin17 wrote: post #35

Just a reminder you can host a static site or any other kind of site on your home computer. That's the internet folks.

And then you leak your info to whatever malicious site does a port scan to its visitors. I'm highly anti residential hosting

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

#219

Post by messo »

Hosting a personal blog on old / cheap hardware at home and accepting some downtime now and then should be a trade-of worth making for most. An interconnected web of documents served from personal computers residing under a desk or in a basement – it is a beautiful thing.

We nerds often seem to fall into the trap of over-engineering things, like, spending a lot of time building personal stuff that can scale into the infinity – only to end up never having more than 10 concurrent visitors at any given time.

By accepting and embracing the intermittent and slightly unstable nature of serving websites from our homes, we can take back much of the in(ter)dependence and hacky, quirky fun that many of us fondly remember from the 90's and 2000's.

Setting up a webserver on a Pi and serving it from home can be a fun project, not necessarily trivial for everyone, but definitely within reach for most technically inclined people.

Might be among the cheapest, easiest AND fun ways to host a static site :)

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

#220

Post by maest »

crazypython wrote: post #58
pgroves wrote: post #55

I have my site in an S3 bucket with the static-site flag activated. It would not win for 'easiest'. However, it's the only thing in my personal AWS account right now and my monthly bill is $0.83

An S3 bucket is intended as storage, not retrieval. Downloading from S3 means grabbing shards. You should put a proper CDN, like CloudFront or Cloudflare, in front.

You can use CloudFront with an S3-backed static website.
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