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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

A few comments point out, and I agree, that setting up, never mind maintaining a webpage, has become a PITA:

- server (AWS? 10 optional services to config etc etc, config, updates etc)

- domain

- SSL cert

Are there solid providers who do it all-in-one? I pay one bill, get a domain, SSL certificate, renewed, and a managed, pre-configured Linux box, or even static hosting? Thinking of setting up a webpage for my consulting business and I'd rather not spend weeks fiddling with all this, or (shudder) use Wix.

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Literally type "webhosting" into a search engine and every single provider that comes up will do that all-in-one. They'll also throw in a database and PHP, probably with an automatic installer for things like WordPress. There's a good chance your registrar will even try to upsell you the whole package.

These things are not the hard part.

Backblaze offers 10 GB of free storage and CloudFlare offers free data transfer from B2, with these two you can host a static site for free. I have a worker script that routes requests to the index page and sets cache headers for my site.

  export default {
    async fetch(req, env, ctx) {
      // Cached response
      let res = await caches.default.match(req);
      if (res) return res;
  
      // Fetch object from origin
      let reqPath = new URL(req.url).pathname;
      reqPath = reqPath.replace(/\/$/, ''); // Remove trailing slash
      if (!reqPath.includes('.')) // Check file extension
        reqPath += '/index.html'; // Default to index page
  
      res = await fetch(env.ORIGIN + reqPath);
      if (res.status === 404) // Object not found
        res = await fetch(env.ORIGIN + '/404.html');
  
      // Configure content cache
      res = new Response(res.body, res);
      const ttl = res.headers.get('content-type').startsWith('text')
        ? 14400 : 31536000; // Cache text 4 hours, 1 year default
      res.headers.set('cache-control', 'public, max-age=' + ttl);
  
      // Cache and return response
      ctx.waitUntil(caches.default.put(req, res.clone()));
      return res;
    },
  };

You can do it a lot easier with GitHub pages, but no business owner is going to be able to do either of these.

You can use GitHub pages. Or just set up one virtual server and host everything on it - I do that and it's pretty painless. The "10 services on AWS" is definitely the most painful way there is.

Providers like Netlify, Firebase Hosting, CloudFlare are much better value for money for features for maintenance. Static hosting means you don't need to update the server because there isn't one, and there are even free tiers below a certain usage.

There's still the usability thing, they're not made for non-techies. There's an assumption you'll use Git, etc. But there's no practical reason why Netlify CMS or similar couldn't handle everything.

I have actually been experimenting with this. And it's real simple.

I think for these cases everyone should be shooting for a static site. In which case it is: 1. Rent a vps 2. Buy a domain 3. Set up nginx or something else 4. Copy files to the right folder 5. Point a dns record to said server 6. Use certbot to get an ssl cert installed for you

It's not that hard really.

It's not that hard for you... the process you just described is unintelligible for 99% of the population I would say. And then you have to produce the content on top of that.

The article isn't about general population.

> if you are a business or an individual artist or creator

If you're in any of those categories you're probably already in a small fraction of the population.

And yes this would only work with tech savvy people. I was mostly responding to the idea that AWS would need to be involved.

For the non tech savvy there's WordPress and Wix, no?

Sorry, just confirming, this is sarcasm, right?

NearlyFreeSpeech might be what you want. Been using them for over a decade and still love them. They handle domains/DNS, hosting (static and other), mysql hosting, email forwarding, and much more. They also have great content policies, ie they only kick you off if you're breaking the law.

This has always been the case, not sure why you’d frame it as a recent development. Not that long ago you even had to PAY for an SSL cert. Domains are nothing new. You always needed a server.

It hasn't. TLS was not needed until recently. Non-TLS sites used to show up in search results. TLS was not mandatory at all. Also ISPs often provided users with a free webspace. So I could just send 1 html file to my host without much technical knowledge and I had a website that people could visit.

Static hosting is amazing for toooons of use-cases. Especially those where You Just Need A Website (business hours, contact info, general info).

Netcup, Hetzner, Strato, OVH, Ionos, ...

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