Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end
sitesauce.app
sitesauce.app
I hated Wordpress so much so that I wrote my own CMS + static site generator using a different approach and used it for clients who run sites with 3 million+ visitors a month currently. Once we made that move, we realized how horribly slow was Wordpress even on the best hardware thrown at it. Our costs dropped down to 1/10th of what we used to spend as well purely in terms of hardware. I can easily believe that static sites are the future.
I think this space has a lot of room for new players and definitely worth to keep a watch on. All the best. Hope you see success.
Neya
I was using another static site generator (Hexo), but at some point I wanted to change some things and add some custom html to my posts. Since the documentation was ... well ... minimalistic on some aspects, I also spent some time looking at the source code. But at that point I was really wondering what benefit I still had from using that generator.
In the end, all a static site generator does is collecting some markdown or RST files, converting them to html and putting that into a template html file. And generating some lists (index page, RSS, ...) and some metadata for SEO. So it took me a single Saturday to make a working static site generator and now I can do anything I want without looking up documentation or source code, since it's my own dumpster fire :-)
There’s an outstanding and fairly flexible static site generator for rst files in Python that’s been around for quite a long time, called Sphinx. It’s basically a docs generator but I’ve used it as a generic static site generator.
These OTS static site generators are fine for small sites, but at the scale of our clients who have more than 30k posts and counting, none of these would be able to handle it. When I say handle it, I also am referring the time taken to generate 30,000 posts in the shortest possible time. In a custom solution, you're able to optimize this heavily. I brought it down to 30 minutes from 1.5 hours for 30k posts.
Why not simply add a caching layer infront of a Wordpress instance? For starters, this is a media company, so they would like to have instantly updated posts on certain parts of their site. For that, you need to disable caching. Which means tens of thousands of requests are hitting your instance every minute. So, that means you need a high performance server + SQL instance (Expensive). It worked out to $3000USD per month just for servers alone.
The static site generator use just $100/month instance, for comparison. Of course, there is also the development cost for the client for this solution, but I can comfortably share that their ROI would be less than a year if you factor just server costs alone.
There are many other bonuses with a custom static solution - Your whole theme can be broken down into an MVC paradigm which makes future integrations super clean and easy. Codebase maintainability also has improved drastically - partly because of the language itself (Elixir) and partly because of the MVC architecture.
How are their posts instantly updated using a static site generator? Don’t get me wrong, I was sold on in static site generators years ago. But not understanding this argument.
Right now, we have MVC down to the theme level. It helps write cleaner code and writing integrations to our site much much faster. There's tons of integrations that large media sites actually use. Eg. ad server related, tracking related, etc.
Kudos to you for actually building and launching! Hope you have a lot of success and prove me wrong about the market size.
EDIT: After going through the site and your video, it appears as though you crawl the dynamic site, and generate static pages out of it. It's not really clear if you support sites that render on the client side. Do you?
How is this different from a CDN cache?
Does this deal with/forward dynamic content on the same domain? Or do admin panels, etc have to be hosted on a separate subdomain?
EDIT: Wow, Miguel is even completely transparent (https://sitesauce.app/open) with his revenue and costs. That's incredibly inspiring to see from an 18 year old.
Edit: This is not a problem for a lot of pages. But to me that is a deal breaker to use Vercel for any medium or large sized projects.
To be compliant, the 7-day free trial should be possible without having to provide credit card details.
That is, in any case, best practice, unless profiting from people who forget to cancel is an important part of your business plan.
"Sitesauce hosts your static sites on Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost."
Then in your Terms of Service you say:
"You agree that Sitesauce is not responsible for any additional fees charged to your credit card by third-party server providers such as Vercel."
How does the hosting work? Do I sign up with Sitesauce and also sign up for Vercel? If that is the case, would I be able to pick a different host if I wanted? If it isn't the case and Sitesauce handles the backend process of creating an account on Vercel is it paid for by using my credit card and you pass that info to Vercel?
"Sitesauce publishes your static sites to Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost."
That makes it clear that you aren't the one hosting and that it is actually Vercel. My initial understanding was that you would pull my data and host it yourself using Vercel as your host. Since you are using the host's API do you have any plans to integrate with other hosts, such as AWS?
Thank you for creating this. It's a great product, something I'd happily pay $20 for.
I think you should perhaps market this to the SEO community. They care tons about pagespeed. Also, set up an affiliate program.
All the best!
My advice (teenager or not) is join online communities like indie hackers and get all the help because anyone doing this at any age needs to learn diverse skills, it’s not just about having an idea and coding.
It's a great idea for a service, but the pricing just seems too simplistic.
So the bigger question then is what happens when they change this? Or go away. Also, have you seen what "Additionally, different hard limits apply for each plan." means on their pricing page[1]? Domain limits, maximum files, etc? What those might mean when you scale beyond expectation?
I don't mean to discourage. But big vendors pull the rug out from under people all the time, sometimes ruining a business because there's no viable alternative.
Make sure your eggs can be put in different baskets if need be.
> Sitesauce recommends the use of JAMstack-friendly alternatives to this services. For example, you could move your contact forms to StaticKit or your comments to Commento.
> However, there are times where the only option is to rely on your backend. For this, you can configure Sitesauce to proxy certain endpoints to your backend. You can also use this if you need to fetch some data from your backend via AJAX.
No way? At all? Why could they not deface or alter the static version? Of course there's a lot less attack surface but that doesn't mean it's invulnerable.
If you're tempted to point out that those approaches are a pain to use and don't work perfectly, well a) welcome to a lot of open source, and b) that's why commercial ventures can still succeed.
Everything has a cost. You can spend money. Or you can spend time. But either way, you will spend.
For example, Product X is $20 per month. To do the same yourself is 60 to 90 minutes per month. It's fair that you might not mind the time. You want to learn something new. But the idea that you're saving $20 per month is the wrong lens.