Which service do you use to host static website? | Hacker News Reader

Which service do you use to host static website?

38 pointspunit250247 comments

Firebase Hosting, Netlify, surge.sh, Github pages or some other service

I think I've tried everything. Firebase, Netlify, S3+Cloudfront, Github+Cloudflare are the main contenders.

I benchmarked them myself and using https://www.webpagetest.org/ in numerous locales.

Netlify has the edge as their publishing model is slick. They know there has been an update and can trigger the nodes automatically. My only complaint? They have a soft bandwidth limit - I wish I could pay to lift it. I know they won't enforce - it's there to stop abuse. But they can take my $. For the apex (sans "www") domain, you need to let them manage DNS, which is backended by NS1.

Firebase hosting is excellent. Really top class. But I found it to be a little slower on the deploy side. If you think you may use some kind of backend functionality, this is a smart option. Even with an A Record on the DNS they were fast. I think Google's Anycast network must be top notch (no surprise, really).

Github+Cloudflare was pretty good too. But the invalidation model was something you needed to work with. Plus every now and then I'd hit a cold node (I assume) and it was slower. Overall it was great, but just a nose behind and not as easy to use. One area where they really were consistently ahead was DNS.

So lots of good options. Reality is they are so close you're best going for the option you're most comfortable with. For vanilla I love Netlify. For anything JavaScript-y Firebase is great.

Edit: I was curious, so I checked on Netlify. I think they're hosted on Google Cloud... Which would make sense.

At Netlify we're multi cloud - currently run our infrastructure across 7 different cloud providers and are constantly expanding.

Big fan of GitHub Pages + Cloudflare.

After you've set it up once, subsequent projects are effortless.

I've also experimented with injecting CircleCI into the mix to do custom build steps outside of what's supported by GitHub Pages.

I use Hugo [0] as a static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterward you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean (starting with 5€ a month which scales well) [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

- [0] https://gohugo.io/

- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

- [2] https://pages.github.com/

- [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

- [4] https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

Netlify. I used to use GitHub Pages + Cloudflare (for SSL on custom domains), but deploy previews made me try out Netlify, and I've had a fantastic experience with it.

S3 and Cloudfront, with recurring Lambda to update Let’s Encrypt TLS certs.

FYI ACM certificates are free [0], and will be automatically rotated. I use Hugo + S3 + CloudFront + ACM cert for SSL.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/faqs/#billing

Absolutely. I considered going that route, but went with Let’s Encrypt on principle, rather than practicality.

Thanks for this outstanding idea. Unfortunately even for legitimate, properly registered businesses in China, hosting on S3 is illegal for some inexplicable reason. Any other very light, easy to manage versions for EC2, preferably something that can be run with Dokku?

GitHub Pages with a static site generator and Travis CI is superb.

I have my blog [0] setup so that all I need to do in order to publish a new article is add a markdown file to my GitHub pages source repo. Travis then builds the html and pushes it back to the GitHub pages repo.

You can easily add files and edit markdown on the GitHub web interface so I essentially use GitHub as a CRM. If you're interested, have a look at my GitHub Pages repo [1] and Travis CI build config [2].

[0] http://www.samlewis.me [1] https://github.com/samvrlewis/samvrlewis.github.io/tree/webs... [2] https://github.com/samvrlewis/samvrlewis.github.io/blob/webs...

Firebase here as well.

Why I like it:

-CLI makes it easy to use.

-Deploying to the internet is as easy as "firebase deploy"

-Comes with HTTPS for free and with zero config

-Automatmagically uses Firebase's CDN

-Can serve with your custom domain name

-Low cost (for my needs/traffic levels)

-(Mostly)Straightforward documentation/references

Pain point(s):

-Slightly fragmented documentation. This was only one instance, so I might be blowing it out of proportion. I wanted to have Clean URLs in my website, there was no mention of that capability in the Firebase docs -> "Customize hosting behavior".

    But the only instance I found this feature was from a random Firebase blog post from 2 years ago. 

    https://firebase.googleblog.com/2015/12/a-host-of improvements_61.html

-I can't view the contents of what I'm hosting from the web based (At least I tried to, and can't figure it out.)

-Deploys can be slow(30 secs -2 min), but honestly I should setup a CD pipeline and stop staring at it while it's deploying.

I originally was going to use Google Cloud Storage, but they don't support HTTPS out of the box.

Nearlyfreespeech is superb.

Now I'm using Uberspace, and they are excellent, as well.

Seconding nearlyfreespeech.net for simple php sites, but for static I'd say either that or Github Pages.

Google Cloud Storage

I quite like that it comes with command line util so it's easy to sync up changes with one command.

It's also dirt cheap if you have modest traffic. I doubt I'll spend anything significant. Maybe a few cents?

As an aside: I am changing my opinion on static site generators.

They make things harder because you need to learn the generator syntax. The programming constructs in Hugo for example are woefully inadequate for anything serious. For example you can't parse a date as far as I can tell.

My solution for the next static project is to use the web framework I am used to (in my case ASP.NET MVC) and knock it up in that. I can use output caching and read from resource files to get the static site performance and not deal with a DB.

When I need to customize I will save a lot of time and frustration as I can just do what I need to do from experience.

> My solution for the next static project is to use the web framework I am used to (in my case ASP.NET MVC) and knock it up in that. I can use output caching and read from resource files to get the static site performance and not deal with a DB.

Look into Wyam (https://wyam.io/) a bit. You might find it's extensibility to write custom modules similar to what you are trying to accomplish.

If you want anything serious with a language to generate html, css etc. you should look into scribble/pollen. Of course, like you said, you need to be familiar with the syntax.

Did you try Gatsby?

I’d like to add to the question a further question: which one would be best in the situation where I want to regenerate the static page programmatically? So basically something running on a server somewhere will run periodically (probably on a trigger) and deploy a new copy of the static page to the proposed host. So the question is which host has the best platform for that kind of rapid deployment? Hoping not to use FTP for example.

(disclaimer: Netlify employee)

Netlify supports running a build script automatically whenever you push to one of our supported Git providers (we also have a CLI tool for those who prefer to do that manually). This includes creating deploy previews for branches other than your main deploy branch (such as PRs).

This is actually how the project I work on, Netlify CMS[0] works - the CMS is a completely open source, front-end application that pushes to GitHub using their REST API. If you’re using Netlify‘s continuous deployment, GitHub’s webhook system notifies Netlify of the push and Netlify’s buildbot builds and deploys the update to your site automatically.

[0]: https://netlifycms.org

Since you're here, I would like to take this opportunity to ask a quick question. My Jekyll site is already running on Netlify, but instead of manually creating files, I used Google Sheets and a simple NodeJS script to sync everything. Would it be possible to run this NodeJS script on Netlify CD and push to git and then let Netlify build my Jekyll site? (The script basically pulls a Google Sheet, creates markdown files and download and resizes some images)

Netlify continuous deployment is triggered by a Git commit, but you can run arbitrary Node scripts (though not _just_ Node scripts, of course) as part of your build process. I don't know of a way you could trigger deploys based on changes to the Google Sheets app without some code on your end (maybe IFTTT could work?), but everything else should be feasible if I'm understanding you correctly.

That's what I thought, I'll probably need another step somewhere that triggers the syncing and then pushes to git. After that Netlify CD would do the rest. Thanks.

I've setup that flow by adding a custom script in the google doc that triggers a Netlify build hook. You can tie custom scripts to an image (so you can make it a publish button).

I use Jekyll [1] for static website and GitLab Pages [2] to host it. GitLab Pages supports not only Jekyll but also other static site engines. You can also use custom domain and SSL for your site.

[1]: https://jekyllrb.com/

[2]: https://about.gitlab.com/features/pages/

My own VPS on OVH. I stuff several other services in there. They get as low as 2.99 Euro per month. Probably pure hosting is much cheaper though.

S3 + Cloudfront seems to be a popular choice.

GitLab pages but for no particular reason... I use Hugo and want HTTPS on a custom domain so that seemed to be an easy way to do it. Only problem is that GitLab does not redirect to the HTTPS version automatically.

I might try Netlify some day if it's as easy as GitLab + has custom HTTPS domains for free.

We're trying to do the https redirect in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28857

(disclaimer: Netlify employee)

We do indeed offer free HTTPS and custom domain support (as well as the two together) on our free plan. I haven’t used GitLab Pages myself, so I couldn’t compare further off the top of my head.

I am looking for a proper answer to this myself.

But.. If for something real simple (if you are ok with an ugly URL), I have tried Google drive (with a public folder) and Blogspot with some quick and dirty JS in the mix.

nginx at my house.

nginx on a $5/mo virtual private server (vultr, linode, digitalocean)

nginx is incredible at serving static content. Also a CDN is often overkill for the majority of websites. If you have never setup a web server before, its worth taking a couple hours (or as much time as you need) to learn. It's a very empowering experience!

for comments I'm building a service called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com) - its live on about 15 sites right now and growing.

Netlify

Mostly for the simple SSL setup.

Same! Struggled with github pages at one point but Netlify really just made it a two command process to get a site up with SSL. I love it!

Im using neocities, it seems good so far. I'm paying 5$ per month so i can use my own domain.

Alibaba OSS + ECS, along with Nanoc, a static site generator, this is the best choice in China.

I used to do Google Storage + Cloudflare before.

Switched to Netlify for a couple of projects and loving it.

I use Firebase Hosting, it's pretty simple, but I also use other Firebase Services.

Github pages with Jekyll brought me back into blogging after a decade long hiatus.

I really like surge.sh. It's become my default for this type of thing.

Github Pages + CloudFlare for the SSL in case of custom domain.

S3 does the job wonderfully for one-off projects.

VPS with nginx and cloudflare in front of it

keybase.pub! https://keybase.pub/

Digital Ocean.

Seems like overkill for just a static site. I'd rather upload my assets somewhere and have it served out of the box than configuring and securing a web server for arguably negligible benefit.

Making your site reliant on multiple other companies' services (eg s3 relies on a heap of other aws services and can go down if those dependencies are down) just to host some static files seems overkill to me, when a single server you control can do it for you with minimal setup.

one.com

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