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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

Often I show people how to write simple HTML and CSS sites. They are usually just making simple single page sites but they are extremely satisfied by being able to do it themselves.

What is the simplest way to get these single file HTML sites hosted? Preferrably without having to teach another tool or language?

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I'm working on a beginners computing course, and of all the self-host options for HTML and CSS, the easiest one is glitch.com. You can drag and drop files, edit code right there in a nice environment, and also get a subdomain that you like. Surge and Netlify on the other hand requires Terminal knowledge and requires npm installed. Glitch can all be done on the browser.

Netlify allows you to drag and drop a folder only using a browser. It works great for the output directory of static site generators or a set of hand-coded HTML files. No CLI required.

Thanks, that works. It was erroring when I had tried last time.

Neocities.org seems ideal for this. I personally use the free tier of netlify at the moment, but I'm considering switching to neocities instead since I just have simple personal stuff to serve and I like the neocities ethos.

Take a look at https://glitch.com/, you could easily host static pages there.

Put it in an AWS S3 bucket.

use aws command line tools to sync to your local repo

easy way:

aws s3 copy index.html s3://<mybucketname.com> --profile <awskeys for this client>

hard way:

cd <mywebsiteroot dir>

git pull ## if needed

<website builder> ## i.e. webpack, angular, whatever

aws s3 sync public_html s3://<mybucketname.com>/ --profile <awskeys for this client>

The problem with beginners and S3, is that they can't handle the billing side. Both calculating (outbound? same region? edge location?) and monitoring if things go south. Beginners will prefer the site going down rather than paying extra.

Yeah, I use S3 myself for a static website (as well as podcast hosting and misc other stuff). But the lack of hard cost circuit breakers make me hesitant to recommend AWS in general to beginners for casual storage and hosting.

For true beginners even the easy single command might not be easy. You need to be familiar with the command line, you need to install the aws tool and hope that you don’t run into issues (often times if you’re on Windows installing command line tools can involve extra hoops for example), you need to navigate the AWS dashboard and get familiar with their unintuitive terminology (to host a site you need an “s3 bucket”), then you also need to create a key for your client and learn what a key is. Individually those tasks are not that difficult, but when you’re a beginner it adds up and quickly becomes intimidating.

Check out https://versoly.com/ which is listed in the article.

We have a code editor built into the platform.

A lot of our customers learnt basic HTML/CSS using it.

And it is something I wish existed 9 years ago when I first started learning HTML at university. Design is a huge barrier when learning HTML as everything looks terrible.

By using Bootstrap and a website builder you get to create great looking websites easily.

I have been really liking Github Pages as I learn HTML myself (not a developer). Not only is it (for static sites) but the Git workflow has given me the confidence to take more risks. If I make a mistake and break my webpage, I just revert the commit and no harm done!

I don't even truly know Git but easily got the hang of committing via Github's Desktop app GUI.

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