Consider these simpler alternatives:
- https://pages.cloudflare.com/
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...
- https://pages.cloudflare.com/
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...
Also, I don't use Git or Github.
It's more complicated because you need to know more random tech that I bet you don't want to learn. Which is fine, it's really not necessary.
By the way, you should learn git sometime. Or there's a couple other VCSes that are somewhat known, but git is both good and has good networking effects (everyone uses it).
I'd love to be able to make red-line decisions like this regardless, no matter what. For example, I absolutely hate MacOS and would love to say "hard no" to any job offer if they insist that I use MacOS, regardless of job fit or TC. But ultimately, I back down once they show me the money, and find myself using it anyway.
In this case I'd say that "simple" is a product of familiarity, manual steps, and future maintenance. "Get a VM" also means "install stuff on a VM", "secure a VM", "monitor load, memory, disk space on a VM" and "manage a VM into the future, upgrading the host OS and fixing whatever breaks". Is rsync easier than git? Maybe, but it doesn't have version control (which is nice to have). I think the git suggestions are based on the assumption that only a tiny number of people could do VM setup, webserver config, rsync etc but couldn't do git add, commit and push.
Personally, I use Cloudflare because it handles DNS, CDN and is basically hands-off after setup.
* No need to install and configure web server
* No need to setup firewall
* No need to main and patch above components every day
* No need to upgrade the OS every few months/years
I have not used mercurial in close to a decade, but from what I can remember you could push to a git server from the mercurial client.
If you want to maintain your Mercurial setup then consider S3 + Cloudfront.
Should your needs grow past simple static sites they are hoping you will use their paid options. This isn't a "you are the product" situation.