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Comment by ducharmdev | Hacker News Reader

GitHub Pages or Netlify for sure. With either of these options, your static site can be set up to deploy whenever there's new commits to the specified branch.

Me and a friend mentor for Code Louisville, and we're able to get the beginner frontend students up and running very quickly using these options - they're free and much easier to use.

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I see the "GitHub Pages" suggested a lot whenever this question comes up, but it's worth noting that it's against their ToS[0] to use it for commercial purposes:

"GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS)."

So it's great if you want to host a personal site / blog or some other non-revenue-generating website, but for anything more than that you could run into issues.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...

Anyone got issues with this?

In my opinion, there are some cases where it is a gray area: professional portfolio, case studies website with an email collection form, blog posts where you mention that you are a freelancer, a site where you link to your YouTube videos, some simple JavaScript app that don't require a backend but might make some money with ads...

So I'm just wondering how often they strike down at people who operate in this gray area.

I suspect it’s more a “don’t yell at us if your business site is down because you don’t know what you’re doing”.

The SaaS part might have more teeth.

That's a great point. I actually looked at GitHub pages and my main issue with it is there's no way to password lock the site. I don't need serious security here, but I also don't exactly want the entire world to see my HTML playground.

I'm not sure why they're doing it this way, it should be a nominal task to restrict viewers to those with read access to your repo, but I think it underscores the use cases they have in mind here. They want you to use it as a blog and not as a serious web hosting solution.

> it should be a nominal task to restrict viewers to those with read access to your repo

I don't think it would be quite that trivial. They would have to inject authentication into your HTML, which could cause lots of things to break.

They offer it for Github enterprise .

Even for private stuff you're under dictation of a 3rd party that decides what you're allowed to say to whom and who eavesdrops. US was once famous how they valued free speech. Tempi passati.

I discovered Netlify through Netlify CMS. I had a pretty bad opinion about Netlify CMS, so I was pretty sure Netlify was going to be at least as bad.

Damn, I have never been so wrong:

  - the interface is so intuitive I never opened the documentation
  - this is FAST (the bottleneck to see my website live is now my browser cache)
  - no need to create a Github Actions pipeline to deploy, just say "hey, my repo is here"
  - automatically integrated with Let's Encrypt for custom domains
  - deploy previews!!!

And so much more.

My favorite feature is automatic deployment of pull requests. I love it, and I wish there was something as cheap and easy for backend services as well. Though I guess it's not too necessary if you implement testing properly :p

LayerCI[1] maybe?

[1] - https://layerci.com/

This looks almost too good to be true from the docs. Thank you, I'll check it out.

Heroku has offered branch previews for a while now

Edit: they call it Review Apps (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-rev...)

Also, preview deployments for PRs.

I swear by Netlify. It's fantastic, and I use it for several sites, not least of which is my own personal site.

One of their neat features is the ability to spin up "pull request sites" automatically, so you can share versions of your site with stakeholders before it's made live.

Also you can deploy your `public` folder to Netlify simply by drag-and-drop. I love this.

+1 I have been using Netlify to host 3 static sites for many months now. Have had 0 issues. Set up took <15 minutes. Making changes is a breeze.

I've been very happy with this setup for my simple personal marketing site.

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