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Comment by JamieF1 | Hacker News Reader

Is this not a chance for github to make some money? I'm about to launch a site on github pages (simple html site, no backend) and there's a tiny chance of it going viral. If it were to reach the 100k limit for requests I'd be more than happy paying github to keep it hosted there.

I already have hosting with the likes of hostgator but they probably couldn't even handle 100k like github would.

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For simple static pages (with no backend), I would highly recommend putting them on Nearly Free Speech (NFSN) [1] and using the free tier of CloudFlare in front of it. NFSN charges only for what you use, unlike hosts like hostgator and others that have a monthly payment of a few dollars, at the minimum. Excluding domain costs, it will cost you just pennies a year or a few dollars a year. You can also opt for cheaper bandwidth on the site if you wish.

Without ClouldFlare in front, your costs on NFSN may become quite high depending on the size of the content and number of requests.

[1]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net

I used to host some stuff on nearlyfreespeech. I liked the idea in principle, but keeping my account topped up and them charging me extra fees just to pay them became annoying. I switched to Amazon S3 and couldn't be happier. It was harder to setup but worth it.

> them charging me extra fees just to pay them became annoying

NFSN isn't charging you extra fees to make payments. They are being transparent about the fees everybody else hides in the total cost.

Not really. Look at their fee structure. It is more expensive than what Stripe, Paypal, and Square charge.

If you run a personal site on S3 and you get HN level traffic, you're gonna get a very bad surprise on your bank account at the end of the month.

With caching in front I wonder how big the risk is.

I'd qualify it as "not worth it".

To add to the list of alternatives, try netlify it has a free tier with no build limits and provides a pretty liberal and free open-source plan that has more feature than GitHub pages. https://netlify.com/open-source. Just throwing out there as well.

you can also connect your github repo to have a atomic deploys, which is more than you get from gh pages. https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/08/11/from-unstable-to-rel...

There's also surge.sh which is pretty good for static sites. It's essentially Heroku but works with a single HTML file. It's free as well.

is this something like zeit/now?

Yep, looks like it! Looks like there are more limitations with zeit though. At least from the free tier.

For simple sites, I'd advise http://wordpress.com/ it's free and it can take any traffic you throw at it.

It's probably more of a headache than it's worth. Static site hosting is a low margin market that GitHub probably has no interest in entering.

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