Glitch.com is my go-to static site/tinker w nodejs container. Super easy, generous free sku. Put it behind cloudflare if you need.
Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
261–270 of 507 posts
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#262Anybody using S3 static hosting? How does that compare to some of these others, specifically on price?
I'm a happy Wasabi[1] customer. No egress fees, but to avoid abuse I put a caching proxy in front of it and it's cheap and low maintenance. Publishing is just uploading with standard S3 CLI tools.
[1]: https://wasabi.com/
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see the "GitHub Pages" suggested a lot whenever this question comes up, but it's worth noting that it's against their ToS[0] to use it for commercial purposes: "GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial softwar…
Anyone got issues with this? In my opinion, there are some cases where it is a gray area: professional portfolio, case studies website with an email collection form, blog posts where you mention that you are a freelancer, a site where you link to your YouTube videos, some simple JavaScript app that don't require a backend but might make some money with ads... So I'm just wondering how often they strike down at people…
I suspect it’s more a “don’t yell at us if your business site is down because you don’t know what you’re doing”.
The SaaS part might have more teeth.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
The in-between days (after dial-up ISPs, but before "cloud" meant people forgot they could do things themselves) was to host the website on your own computer. For example, an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or an always-on-anyway desktop. I host my personal site this way. I also host about 100 mostly-static mostly-low-use websites at work similarly: with Apache on a couple of VMs. They are more reliable than the free ver…
I'm not sure how you do this unless you have a static IP somehow? In my experience ISPs don't offer that to residential clients
My IP and a friends have been the same for five+ years even though it’s technically dynamic. DYDNS hasn’t really done much.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#265I 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
Cheapest however, is out the window. I mean, if there's a chance, however remote, that you might end up as the #1 of reddit or whatever, stay away from S3. Your site won't go down, but oh god, you pay for that.
yeah no. even if it gets wildly popular over night you'll only pay a few dollars
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloudflare Pages will reload/redeploy on any git push right (just like Netlify?) ? Just want to be sure before I try it out..
For Github, yes. For anything else, you would have to use their rancher tool and Cloudflare KV store. I imagine they have plans to support other providers, but aren't quite there yet.
Seems like a great way to go, and if they implemented a Netlify CMS-like feature as well, that would really put it over the top as a unified one-stop shop for DNS/CDN/static site hosting + authoring built-in, and it also has Workers for any functions/dynamic pieces that might be needed.. all on Cloudflare's metal/edge. Sounds almost too good to be true..
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#267Which ones work with Tor (without captchas?)
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#268I personally use Firebase for all my static sites. Completely free and fast. If you need to run some backend function they have Firebase functions which is free to a certain degree too. Example site: https://jeremyshaw.co.nz Other than that I'm sure Github Pages and Netlify are fine, both very popular options. Worst case you put it on Amazon S3 and get charged a fraction of a dollar every month .
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 $150. It seems hard to get bitten by huge surprise costs from a blog on Firebase static hosting, even if someone's using a botnet to try to drive up your bill.
Edit: Thinking about it a little more, I guess you could find the largest resource on a blog and direct your botnet to download it nonstop repeatedly, and that would be orders of magnitude more expensive than even large organic traffic.
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#269AWS S3 + Cloudfront.
The initial setup can be a little finicky, but once you do get it setup, the rest of the time you only do an S3 sync from your local dir to the S3 bucket.
It will also be stupid fast (cloudfront is edge networks) + have ssl + it will not go down if you ever see a surge in traffic.
I have several of these and they work beautifully. As far as cost goes: 12$/domain per year + 0.5$/month for route53 zone + 0.2$/month for the actual traffic and hosting the content in S3. So it's under 2$/month for "enterprise grade"
Re: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
#270Regarding some cost free solutions mentioned here: how does the saying 'if it is free, then you are the product' hold up?
The free plans usually have limits such that they’ll work for individuals but not businesses.
And someone using free plan X at home is more likely to choose Pod plan Y from the same provider for work.