How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github • Hacker News Board

Re: How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github

#31

Post by eli » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 1:50 PM UTC

activepeanut wrote: post #12

nthitz wrote: post #11

I wonder if people start abusing this if Github were to put any restrictions on it somehow. For quick one off single page things sure why not, but if people start trying to host huge websites on Github? I'd be curious as to their response.

Yeah, this is ripe for abuse by pornographers. :(

We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service.

and

If your bandwidth usage significantly exceeds the average bandwidth usage (as determined solely by GitHub) of other GitHub customers, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your file hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption.

I wouldn't worry too much about it.

https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service

Re: How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github

#32

Post by aGHz » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 3:22 PM UTC

Seems like a good place to link to "Poll: What's your favorite static site generator?"[1] submitted a few days ago. The most interesting notion to take away is that, for all the buzz surrounding static site generators like Jekyll and Pelican, you can actually accomplish the same goal using absolutely any backend you're comfortable with. As long as your output doesn't contain anything dynamic, you can even use frameworks like Django or Rails then pair this with a spider (e.g. wget) to pull all the dynamically-_generated_ output into a static snapshot that you then upload to GitHub.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473

Re: How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github

#33

Post by nachteilig » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 3:30 PM UTC

Does one have to make the _yourusername_.github.com repo first for this to work? My understanding is that the Pages feature is only activated by doing this.

Re: How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github

#34

Post by rsenk330 » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 6:55 PM UTC

redidas wrote: post #15

Is the ability to use custom domains free now? In the past I thought you had to be under one of the paid github plans. Oddly enough, I don't see any mention of this in the github article explaining how to set up a custom domain: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...

I've been using a custom domain (for free) for over a year now. Really cool for simple static sites.

Re: How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github

#35

Post by nvr219 » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 12:20 AM UTC

oceanic wrote: post #14

simonsarris wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what? Me too. I miss Geocities and I never realized until just now. That was a great internet. The people's internet. I was 13 years old but I was allowed to make a website for free, with no help or direction from parents or teachers or anyone, with barely anything to learn. And when I was done it was there. It was a thing I made on the internet and I could show anyone. And I did, and it was probably embarra…

I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. I remember getting on Geocities in 1996 and finding a burgeoning community, full of randomness and fun, all learning as we went along about how build websites. I remember mine was in the “Bourbon Street” “neighbourhood”. I had a lot of fun that year, messing about on IRC, learning HTML, building (ugly :-) websites, helping others do the same. Can't believe I sound no…

Same here. I remember in '97 my grandma bought me a Geocities "plus" (or whatever it was called) account so I could have a geocities.com/~username vanity address. All my real life nerd friends were so jealous of me. :-)

Having free home pages on Geocities did a lot for my career. What will my son gain from whatever "social" web site is around when he starts using a computer (and yeah he also already has his own domain name)?