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Free hosting for static websites

coralrift.com

54 pointsdpieri18 comments

You know, my 7yo has been asking for me to let her create a web page for some idea she has about crime reduction. Might be a decent test case.

Also, GeoCities 2.0, c/d?

Nice, coralrift is slick. It does look super similar to http://staticloud.com

I wonder how much inspiration they have taken from there. It looks like they have uploaded their demo site to: http://dane2.staticloud.com/

Who would be the target market for this sort of service. It is potentially quite niche. Is it targeted towards users technical enough to be able to write html, css, and javascript. But not technical enough to use say Amazon's new static web site options on S3 http://bit.ly/h1rcJ8 or github's static hosting option?

We found out about Staticloud after we started but decided to keep going because we wanted to create something that people could use for their serious websites (like portfolios). Thus the need to have ownership of your subdomain and be able to add and remove files etc...

We were inspired partially by the struggles of our less technically minded classmates [we go to design school] who can piece together a simple portfolio but end up paying $5 a month to tear their hair out trying to figure out how to host their site on Godaddy.

This is pretty impressive. It will be nice to see a way of adding your own domains though.

The video was a little hard to see though, but the simplicity of the process probably negates that fact.

The primary market for this are people who glaze over when you start talking about DNS Servers or CNAME. But that is definitely something that would be cool to add.

Agreed. Sort of like huge number blogger.com users who just use the blogspot.com domain for their blog even though the CNAME option is there. CNAM-ing seems like an easy advanced feature to add later.

I agree, but it might then be nice to offer several alternative TLDs perhaps? Just a thought!

Even for those of us who don't glaze over when you start talking DNS, there's certainly something attractive about the simplicity that you've achieved. With coralrift I can publish a static site in 15 seconds. I'd love to be able to configure the coralrift side to match my TLD in another 15 seconds. I won't mind configuring the other side of DNS "manually".

I like it, very simple and easy.

small bug/feature is that single letter domains are not working, i.e. http://a.coralrift.com

I love free stuff!

Small suggestion: the first instruction was to "drag zipped website here", but it did not mention that I need a file exactly called "index.html" inside. Maybe change it to "drag zipped website containing your index.html here" ? I understand that it gets too long, but then, your first response to customer would be "womp womp womp".

Looks really nice for the non-technically-inclined!

I'll probably be sticking to github or dropbox for my free static sites though. Does this provide any sort of versioning or live editing?

Also, very minor, the FAQ mentions "You can upload .html, .css, .js files." but should probably include any image restrictions.

No versioning or live editing. Of course you can always reupload individual files or a new zip and it will replace whatever was there. For the moment there are no image restrictions.

I think that in the video you should get rid of the elevator music and have someone narrating the most important points about the service, such as how it differentiates itself, what are the limits (storage capacity, etc).

CoralRift and the sites it is hosting are hosted by Dreamhost.

As a fellow Dreamhost customer, I'd be curious to know how it is handling the subdomain creation stuff ... Dreamhost API?

If it's the case, then no "unlimited" bandwidth/disk storage for them:

Here are some specific examples of things not allowed:

Making your account resources available (whether for free or pay) to the general public.

http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited.html

I would guess they have a VPS. A VPS with Dreamhost allows you to do wildcard DNS, so I'm guessing they're doing something along those lines.

Yes, we have a VPS with root access

Coralrift.com is a simple Rails app but we changed the Apache configuration to route all subdomains to individual directories served by Apache.

We had to get a VPS instead of hosting on something like Heroku because we needed access to the filesystem and Apache configuration

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