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Comment by singhrac | Hacker News Reader

I've tried Github pages, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages. Moved last night to the latter.

Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying. It's fairly clear (for obvious reasons) that they mainly think about Jekyll users, though I had a Hugo blog there for a while.

Netlify sounds great, but in practice I ran into an annoying issue that I couldn't resolve where I had to rerun every automatic build. This probably isn't really their fault but the forums didn't work.

Cloudflare Pages kind of just worked out of the box, and since I was already using it for my DNS, changing where the domain pointed took a few seconds.

I'd suspect, if you corrected for how many issues were particular to me, I'd say Cloudflare Pages ~ Netlify > Github Pages. I'm kind of surprised the latter charges you for custom domains; I do have to say there's more documentation for Github than any of the others.

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Basically everything you wrote about GitHub Pages is wrong.

GitHub Pages is static hosting. If you don’t need Jekyll, don’t use it. There’s nothing special about it.

GitHub Pages does NOT charge for custom domains.

You can configure any branch for GitHub Pages, or even just the /docs folder on the main branch.

Just as a clarification, much of what you mention has only changed in the last year or so. For a very long time gh-pages branch and Jekyll were assumed (you couldn't even use plugins with Jekyll). Custom domains weren't free. SSL wasn't free. Github is doing great stuff but it has taken time to evolve into the all free all you can eat buffet you see today.

I have to agree with parent. I've had a custom domain without Jekyll on GitHub pages for well over 5 years now, and it's been free the entire time.

Same here. Not sure where they’re getting that from. Possibly region specific?

I replied upthread, but I made a mistake reading https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/... when revisiting what I remembered, and I was just looking at it from the perspective of private repos. My bad!

Oh right, good point. The repo had to be public until very recently.

Get your facts straight, they have had custom domains for a looong time & there was absolutely no need for Jekyll either at any point to host a page, it just happened to be one the most documented/blogged about way to use GitHub pages with automatic builds instead of having static content.

Free SSL for custom domains happened a few years ago: https://github.blog/2018-05-01-github-pages-custom-domains-h...

That's almost 3 years ago, thread OP said an year or so

Much more than a year, maybe 2-3 years.

I think we've both said correct things, but I think you've missed my meaning: yes, I understand that Github Pages is static hosting, I was point out that by default the build system uses Jekyll. This is nonobvious.

This is in the docs: "GitHub Pages will use Jekyll to build your site by default. If you want to use a static site generator other than Jekyll, disable the Jekyll build process by creating an empty file called .nojekyll in the root of your publishing source, then follow your static site generator's instructions to build your site locally." (https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...). Netlify and CF will both run some other static site generators (e.g. Hugo in my case) for you, while Github Pages will run Jekyll (or you can build locally).

And yes, custom domains are free for public repos. I made a mistake reading the page about custom domains, which mentioned that private repos need a Github Pro account. You're also right about configuring any branch.

I don't use Jekyll and I have never set up a .nojekyll file. I don't know what that is meant to do, but you can deploy whatever you want and it will work just fine.

Maybe you need that file on the rare offchance that you're deploying a site that contains something that looks like a Jekyll config, but you don't want it to be built that way.

Yes, that's exactly the issue. I don't remember the exact file name, maybe it was a directory named "static". The behavior was not as expected, and only a Google search helped me figure out why files were disappearing.

I should warn that bike shedding about this distinction is absolutely not worth your time if you’re reading this and have less than like 100 blog posts written or are running a business on these sites (in which case I think you should pick Netlify). Go write something.

Now you have something to write about.

Yup, it's almost a joke at this point, that the first post on a technical blog is usually about how they build their static blog.

And also, who cares it's a static host and you can change to another one in an afternoon. There's zero lock-in when you're only rsyncing some files around. Just make sure you have total control over your DNS (buy a domain, put it on a good DNS host) and you really can't screw things up too badly.

Who would you consider good DNS hosts? I'm looking at setting up a static site and am new to the whole process

Gandi.net is my favorite - their motto is "No BS" and I've found that to be true.

I've used Gandi.net for the past 18 years and can agree

Another happy Gandi.net user here. Although some domains I point to cloudflare nameservers if I need some of their features.

Used to be a happy Gandi customer but disagree. They ditched their no BS slogan, lost TBs of customer data and made inappropriate remarks about that on social media https://techmonitor.ai/techonology/cloud/gandi-outage-hardwa..., and the upgrade to a new customer portal has been nothing but messy and painful. Happy to no longer be a customer now

I've been super happy with Namecheap, but I only use them for the most basic stuff like A records, CNAME, etc. They don't have an easy to use API (IIRC you have jump through a lot of hoops and whitelist your IP to get access) which is both a good and bad thing.

It's good security because APIs are just another way to gain access to your stuff, and an attacker controlling your DNS has _incredible_ access to ruin your life (steal email, impersonate you... the works).

It's bad though because increasingly we're automating certificates and other stuff through means of using DNS as proof (i.e. set a magic TXT record and lets encrypt will grant you a wildcard SSL cert for free) and many scripts need a DNS provider with good API.

So long way of saying for basic stuff where it's just you going into a dashboard and clicking around to change settings--Namecheap is great. Their DNS comes free with purchase of a domain for a couple bucks, you really can't beat that price.

If you need programmatic API access step up to someone who is running DNS as a core part of their business IMHO--Amazon Route 53, Cloudflare, etc. The bigger the better as they'll have more security resources, support good security practices like 2FA, hardware auth devices, etc. and just generally have more care taken with access to DNS. You'll pay more but you'll get more in the long run.

CloudFlare can be used for dns registration and management as well as ddos protection, ssl cert issuance, origin hiding, static hosting, edge computing, and more, all in the free tier. If you use something like namecheap, you may find the dns resolvers aren’t super great - eg. Changing a record may take 30 mins to propagate because they use higher TTLs by default, whereas CloudFlare’s anycast dns network usually propagates a DNS change where its testable on any network within 60 seconds. The downside of using CloudFlare for both your registrar and operationally is if they ever have an outage at the registrar tier you won’t be able to route to new nameservers. If you’re worried about that you can buy your domain through someone else but point at CloudFlare’s nameservers.

I actually just went the other way. I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures, and the page would not work sometimes in Safari with default settings.

The default setup for GH Pages is not great. Jekyll is very dated. But if you use GH Actions, you can build yourself a pretty great setup. My site is open source at https://github.com/jacobp100/jacob-does-code - there's also a blog post about how the build system works.

Usually when I need static site hosting, I don't want to build myself a great setup - I want to click a few buttons and have a great setup.

Third party free hosting excels at the ability to do a start to finish page in inside an hour. I want to spend 55 minutes of that hour writing the text, not fiddling with oddities of how to make GitHub actions show me the parse errors of my markdown...

Safari + IPv6 = find out a lot about crosswalks and stoplights.

> I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures

As someone who does a lot of browsing with unpopular web browsers, Cloudflare is basically a way to ensure that it is a coin toss as to whether or not I will see your site; it is not the worst CDN/DoS protection racket service out there though. I would like to see how much legitimate traffic Cloudflare or the others block, and how much website operators are spending on that "service."

This is something that is configurable though. If you leave your Firewall security mode to default, then yes it will block IPs with bad rep.

If I don't care about anti-ddos, I just set the Firewall security to Low, and create a Firewall rule to allow everything from 0.0.0.0/0, simple as that.

Good to know that about Cloudflare. Believe it or not, there is at least one DoS protection provider/Web Application Firewall service/whatever you want to call it, that seems to default to asking you to solve captchas to view web pages.

Is there a good alternative, particularly one that does not impose their own moderation/censorship regime? After Cloudflare decided to abandon content neutrality (https://reclaimthenet.org/cloudflare-suspends-8chan/) I really don’t want anything to do with them.

Or are there reasonable software or hardware options to protect one’s own servers directly without relying on a third party service?

I had cloudflare set up on a mediawiki site until last year when for some reason I disabled it and discovered that a lot of issues I'd had accessing the site in Safari went away (like it not letting me login except in private browsing).

I use both pages.dev and netlify.com: pages.dev, even in open beta, is a fantastic product if it suits all your needs, but the limitations [0], if you hit them, are a dead-end and there are no ETAs as to when some of those limitations would be addressed.

That is not the case with netlify.com which boasts a myriad of features, is equally as fast, production-ready, and competitively priced.

With pages.dev, I believe, you pay per every domain you host, whilst with netlify.com, there's no cap on number of domains per account, though they do charge for bandwidth (unlike pages.dev).

Workers Sites [1] is a viable alternative and I quite prefer it over pages.dev.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites

How do you know that Netlify is production ready? I found Netlify Identity to not be production ready* and now I'm not so sure about the rest of the platform.

* Three reasons. 1) The identity widget has people setting it up in such a way that tokens aren't refreshed and logins last only an hour. https://github.com/netlify/netlify-identity-widget/issues/11... 2) Netlify Identity keeps bumping me out despite having gone out of my way to get it configured properly. I don't know why but the issue has lasted for weeks. 3) In development mode, the token can't be verified without making a request to Netlify Functions, and the suggested path (in Redwood.js at least) is to just parse the JWT without verifying it.

> How do you know that Netlify is production ready?

I meant in a way that pages.dev is in "open beta" and netlify.com don't market themselves as such.

Besides, in my personal experience, I never hit any issue with netlify that didn't have a solution.

There is a strong chance that when Pages comes out of beta, Worker Sites is going to be transitioned into Pages, at least thats kind of how I feel about some of the verbiage on this page:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/migrations/migrating...

hey, kristian from the workers team here - i wrote these docs, so this is good feedback :)

we don't have any plans to get rid of workers sites! but we do think that for most people deploying static sites, pages is a better fit than workers sites.

when we do talk about the future of pages versus workers sites, we're generally talking about making it easier to deploy serverless functions /with/ your pages sites - providing better tooling and DX around that is a super high priority for us.

the interplay between workers serverless functions and static asset serving via workers sites is still a really strong use case (and IMO a thing that workers is uniquely capable of doing) that we don't have any plans to shelf. again, i wrote the docs here so this is on me if it came across as "we're getting rid of workers sites" - i'll take a shot at improving these docs and helping clarify that next week!

> With pages.dev, I believe, you pay per every domain you host

nope, we do unlimited sites on pages! here's the free plan [1]:

> 1 build at a time

> 500 builds per month

> Unlimited sites

> Unlimited requests

> Unlimited bandwidth

you can upgrade to the pro ($20/mo) or business ($200/mo) plans for more concurrent builds and builds per month. still not priced per domain or site!

[1]: https://pages.cloudflare.com/#pricing

Hey, do you plan to support Gitlab repos? I'd love to use pages but I can't because my repos are on Gitlab.

hi there! cloudflare pages pm here :) we certainly plan to (nothing against gitlab!!), likely in the next couple months. my email is rita at cloudflare. happy to keep you posted

Thanks.

> ...still not priced per domain or site!

It was my understanding that I had to upgrade each domain to "pro" with $20/month (say, if I wanted pro features like web-analytics on each). Is that not the case?

On netlify.com, "pro" is $19/month per account (not per domain).

> […] Github Pages. I'm kind of surprised the latter charges you for custom domains

What do you mean by that? I've been (and still am) hosting quite a few pages with their service using custom domains and have never been charged for that.

One pretty huge downside for GitHub Pages, is that they still don't seem to serve content to IPv6 addresses.

Saying that because I tried it out again a few weeks ago for a friend's website (https://neasair.org), and nope... it doesn't provide AAAA DNS records (IPv6), just A (IPv4).

So, had to put the website on some other infrastructure already hanging around, that does do AAAA records.

I used to host my site on GitHub but switched to Gitlab pages which doesn't require a special branch or extra finesse. I love it, it's really easy for me to add new posts.

Gitlab pages has an option to look at the /build folder for web pages to serve up. So as long as that folder is in the .gitignore, my Gitlab ci just runs `hugo` to build the site which then gets served up.

gitlab pages is better imo. You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files.

Also, GitLab allows business websites in GitLab pages in free tier, as opposed to Netlify and Github.

"With GitLab Pages, you can publish static websites directly from a repository in GitLab. Use for any personal or business website."

GitHub allows business websites, AFAIK. Where did you get the notion, that it does not?

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

"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)."

Now one could read that as "don't build a SaaS on top of GitHub Pages", but you could also read that as "don't have business websites on GitHub Pages".

That wording specifically disallows both commercial sites and SaaS, so it should be read as both "don't build a SaaS on top of GitHub Pages" and "don't have business websites on GitHub Pages"

> You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files.

That is Netlify and Cloudflare Pages' defining feature, and GitHub has had that for a few years now.

Notably, it's easy to make a review site that integrates with a merge request so you can see it before deploying and get visual reviews any time you have multiple stakeholders. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/

> Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying.

You can configure github projects to source from a different branch (including your main/master branch if you check in build artifacts directly)

Haven't tried Netlify or Cloudfare pages, but I use GH pages for my personal blog (running Jekyll) and I've never seen any reason to switch. You need to know how to use Git and Github, but since you're reading HN you probably know these things. It's really convenient to be able to just push to GH and have it auto-deploy - and it's free.

Granted, my blog is an insignifcant site with a tiny readership and I rarely update it, so if you need something more heavy duty than I have no idea if GH pages is up to the task.

Cloudflare wouldn't work well for me. Filling a captcha everytime to have a page load is stupid.

I know what I do to get that prompt (ahem porn), I can’t imagine what does it on every page load.

IPv6 and aggressive anti third party cookies seem to trigger it pretty well.

>Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying.

You don't need that anymore. You can run Github Pages out of a branch like /docs, which makes life much simpler. That's how I run most of my sites.

Re: Github Pages

- I've got several sites on gh-pages with custom domains and pay exactly $0

- I don't use Jekyll, I literally just `git push` a static repo

The feature that made me change from github pages to netlify was 302s. Cloudflare pages doesn't seem to have that.

You need to use Cloudflare page rules, which has some limits, but works fine for www. redirects etc.

For everything else it expects your SPA to handle it.

Stay tuned. Lots of these Cloudflare Page niddles getting fixed in a few weeks.

What is 302s?

(temporary) redirects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302

Would your ranking change if you assumed you'd be running Jekyll and deploying to Github pages?

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