Statichost.eu – European static site hosting
statichost.eu
statichost.eu
doesn't seem like a good idea
And wise. Well done publishing the Web site which works without fuss in a calm way.
I'm a programmer by trade and do plenty of versioning via _v1 and so on when working on music with others, we basically send .zip files over Telegram and append some label at the end. Not gonna ask these people to learn something when basic "have many copies" does the trick sufficiently good.
It says it's community owned, but i only see one codefloe team member on the forums and a few people (like you). I didn't find any good community rules or pricing, any political statement about the mission, etc. The only thing i found deep in the comments is that it seems to be for people who don't want FLOSS? Also the pricing mentions mixing a non-profit and a for-profit for the best of both worlds, which as Mozilla has shown is a potentially tragic strategy.
To be clear, i'm in favor of more non-profit hosts. But from reading the site i'm not convinced this one is actually for-profit, what the community stands for, and whether i'm the target audience.
I'm not sure where you'd get the idea that Codefloe is for people who don't want FOSS. There are hundreds of open source repos. There are also a lot of personal projects, and probably some commercial ones as well.
What they don't want, is an ideology that restricts the types of projects hosted there. Its available for all software projects. Most of their user base are just using the service - and that is really the point. Similar to how most users on Lichess are there to play chess, not to talk about hosting chess servers.
They are owned by a commercial entity, devXY but they are not profit seeking. They need donations to cover costs but are willing to give that time to build up. There are some regular donors[1], but they are not yet covering all costs [2].
They publish a report every quarter where you can see usage figures.
https://codefloe.com/codefloe/analytics/src/branch/main/repo...
They also publish detailed cost analytics and donations:
[2] https://codefloe.com/codefloe/analytics/src/branch/main/repo...
Both personal and private repos are explicitly permitted in the Codeberg TOS:
> Private repositories[…] allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
Assume you did some local LLM stuff in June that worked with a 200MB set of various jpegs and you wanted to keep it private: Is this still legit in September 2026? I wouldn't rely on it.
Yeah, I think this is a win-win for both parties.
You strike me as someone who would "ride along the lines of the terms of service" basically, and you'll see anything not explicitly forbidden as being allowed essentially.
While Codeberg is a project driven by humans, with human reactions to what's happening. If you're not comfortable with rules not being 100% defined, and requiring a humans value judgement to be had to figure out if the rule is broken or not, I don't think Codeberg is for you.
The rest of us, who are OK with humans making decisions rather than just going by what's written in rules, are fine with this, because we know our private repositories won't be deleted. And if they are, you'll be able to speak with a human to explain, and if your intention is fine and good, they'll be OK with it. But if you try to argue about some "That wasn't explicitly stated", then yeah, they'll probably get tired of you quickly.
Think your participating in your local user group vs some corporate/government forum, the rules will be enforced differently.
By using AI to write code, like virtually everyone does? Tell me, what indication was there in their TOS, that this might be close to a line?
What does "made up" mean? It was a decision by the actual members of the platform, you know, the actual people using it! Nothing "made up" about it.
I think it's pretty clear you don't have an idea of what Codeberg is trying to be, nor do you have any interest in understanding, you just want to push this "Codefloe" platform for some reason. Codeberg make very public what the platform is for and yes, that'll change in the future too, as the world changes.
The reason I'm supporting Codefloe is written in the comment you are responding to. Codeberg is not interested in hosting all FOSS, and Codefloe is. That is the reason. Its very simple.
It is pretty clear you are not making any effort at all to understand the problem people have with Codeberg's rug pull.
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
At least stick with the truth before launching with "the right the to do" (which is also a pretty bad rule because it's completely ambiguous.)
Ambiguous rules with clear objectives is what gives a non-profit the power to be flexible in the way to accomplish common goals. It's based on human trust and is fine by me and others. If you ever were part of a non-profit, you know human trust is an essential component.
There are people who don't understand that and crank out slop. Fuck those people. That isn't what I do.
There are people who don't understand that and won't host my FOSS. Well, I've found someone who will.
They recently made some very ideological decisions…
That doesn’t work because „fine and good“ doesn’t mean the same thing to Codeberg voters/admins and to a large part of the hacke news population. Notably, Codeberg is morally opposed to AI.
Why on earth would Codeberg give even the slighest fucks about what the "hacker news population" finds "fine and good"? Makes absolutely zero sense.
Codeberg made those things against the Terms of Service because paying members who use the platform voted for exactly that. This is how Codeberg works, the members of the platform decides how it works.
Do I trust humans behind Codeberg to behave sensibly? No.
Would more precise terms of service that explain what Codeberg community thinks is ok help with such trust? Yes.
Should the humans behind Codeberg care what I think? Maybe? Presumably they do care about reaching _some_ users, otherwise why have the service public at all?
> The rest of us, who are OK with humans making decisions rather than just going by what's written in rules [...]
Better speak for yourself and not infer from your own views to others. With bad intention this could be interpreted as if I was incapable of dealing with human decisions when all I stated is that I mistrust people who rugpull me.
So, not code for personal projects? Right? A private git repo with my own code, is not permitted.
More to the point of this thread - there is no specific affordance for a personal website.
No, not right. Still wrong:
"Use it for your personal notes, your side project or any other[sic] you want to keep private".
(That's even ignoring that I was addressing the claim that you actually made, which is different from the one you're making now; you're moving the goalposts.)
The terms of service state:
> Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
The TOS Section 1:
> Our service is open for all projects covered by a licence for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works as defined by § 2 (1) 1.
So the "FUD" I am spreading is literally the headline of the legal terms of service. There is an organization behind the spread of this information, and it is Codeberg e.V.
"Codeberg does not permit personal repos"
"A private git repo with my own code, is not permitted"
Codeberg's policy explicitly permits personal repos, including private code repos. Both of your claims are false. There is no getting around this, no matter how much you try to move the goalposts or the other forms of conversational misdirection you're trying to pull off here.
"Codeberg does not permit personal repos"
"A private git repo with my own code, is not permitted"
Codeberg's policy explicitly permits personal repos, including private code repos. Both of your claims are false. There is no getting around this, no matter how much you try to move the goalposts or the other forms of conversational misdirection you're trying to pull off here.
> it could probably support about 10x the volume Codeberg has currently with good performance
I'm very curious about this statement since it seems to also be based on forgejo, and hosted by Hetzner. Maybe there's some forms of clever caching involved? That could explain why the monthly expenditures seem to be moving around so much, which is unusual. Do you have a link about it?
> an ideology that restricts the types of projects hosted there
That's precisely what people who don't want FLOSS say. I appreciate that some communities prevent others from restricting our freedoms; if that means restricting their capability to engage in harmful behavior (eg. non-free software, LLMs, scams, etc) that's a plus. But even codeberg is not that "strict".
> They are owned by a commercial entity, devXY but they are not profit seeking.
I will never trust a for-profit corporation to host my data, and even less so if it claims to not seek profit. If you don't seek profit, there is 0 reason to setup a for-profit company. And depending on your jurisdiction, it may actually be illegal for a for-profit to receive donations.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I hope to be wrong and over time codefloe becomes a flourishing community full of interesting projects and people.
Mostly it is just better/newer hardware for the database servers - both CPU & NVME storage. But also more hosts, that are not sharing system resources, and have sub-ms latency between each other.
Yes, costs change as hardware is added. But this leads to another advantage which is hard to understate:
It is very easy for Codefloe to adapt its hosting architecture because everything is managed with infrastructure as code. So as bottlenecks are found, improvements are benchmarked, change can be deployed safely and reliably. Codeberg is much riskier to change at this point.
Some of this is public here[1] - but I don't really expect it to convince you. What should convince you, is simply using Codeberg. It feels like being on dial-up.
[1] https://pat-s.me/codefloe-launch/#takeaways-from-my-time-wit...
Site is broken on Brave.
At all-inkl.com (no affiliation except being a happy customer) I pay something like 8 EUR to get "unlimited" bandwidth (I'm sure if my site caused a problem I'd hear about it, but I can be sure that there won't be surprise bills, and I know I don't have to worry about "background noise"), static hosting, dynamic and database (which I don't use) hosting, and 5 domains included which makes the net cost of the hosting nearly free.
Also, some people might like it if a product or service was made in US, Switzerland, Germany, Italy etc... for purely personal reasons (feelings).
I see the value for someone who doesn’t know or want to fuss with running their own VM in the cloud, but given the usage of LLM these days… But, one only needs a bit of education to take control into their hands.
1) Netlify forms. I get contact and update workflows for free
2) zero setup SSL, Webserver and CDN
3) It builds a preview link for Pull Requests.
All super useful, and worth paying for.
If I started paying lots for one of these services I would build a form handler, and manage a vps... but today it is cheaper not to
Nope, they bumped the price to €7,13 several months ago. One could still find €5 managed web-hosting though.
"In Brief: statichost.eu does not collect or share any personal information or data. " (2)
Every page contains a hidden 1px pixel img that collects 15+ parameters: https://queue.simpleanalyticscdn.com/simple.gif?version=cdn_......
Yes such info can be used to track people, but only if you have the database and means to - which a single small provider certainly doesn't. So unless you think this data is being sold for profiling I don't think that their claim is false.
Finally, the `id` and `unique` string parameters look like something specifically designed to track people.
So it does not seem to collect IP. Of course it is sent to their servers but they publicly state they don't collect it.
The product says "100% European static website hosting" it does not make any promise about the actual marketing website they have that will be privacy protected.
So yes, you are right they used in their marketing website maybe some trackers and even so based on the link you shared here they seem to use https://www.simpleanalytics.com/ which sounds okish than any other trackers and it might even be also EU hosted: "We're a three-person team based in the Netherlands, building privacy-first analytics for the web"
I did not read with very much attention their website but I think they are not saying they are gluten free and eating a whole wheat bread. But even so it is possible that a cook that produces gluten free bread to sell can eat a whole wheat bread. I see no problem with that.
I also don't think we need metaphors for this. It is clear for me that their USP is hosting in EU and the fact that on their marketing website uses https://www.simpleanalytics.com/data-collection does not contradict their product which is Hosting websites in EU.
What would contradict is hosting their marketing website on US.
Second point is: Yes, their status page should be hosted in other places and I could even understand if they want to host their status page in US or ASIA. I actually think that would be the right way to host their own status page.
Also the traffic cost is ridiculously high. Even AWS (which is often criticized for their high traffic cost) does not bill traffic below 10 TB (20 times higher) and then cost 0.1 EUR / 10 GB (10 times lower)
Pros:
- Run by a single person, so customer service is responsive and comprehensive
- Focused mainly on static hosting without extra complexity
Cons:
- Run by a single person, so increased outage risks
- No support for MFA
- The upload process unconditionally uploads every file rather than an rsync-like sync of only the changed files, which is a pain for my large sites that only change incrementally
- Bot scraper protection is not included (they'll do it for an additional fee)
- Bundles together site builds and hosting, but I only want hosting
This $5/month VPS can effectively handle hosting 100s of static websites for you without breaking a sweat, unless you're doing something seriously wrong.
My websites typically serve 500 GB to 800 TB of bandwidth per month, and I run my businesses on static sites. It's not often that I get a big burst of visitors, but it happens a few times a year, and I wouldn't want to lose out on hundreds to thousands of dollars in sales because I was trying to save $20/mo on hosting.
Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
Much happier with Hetzner, even though it's more expensive.
However their IPv6 /128 allocation is horrendous. But I don't know anyone who does it all actually better.
Their documentation about it is not consistent though, so the confusion is understandable.
> Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
AFAIK there have been ONE instance of a DC taking fire, and it wasn't built from containers.
https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/incendie-sur-un-site-ovh...
And, did you look at the photos you linked lol.
Particularly this one: https://lafibre.info/images/ovh/202202_incendie_ovh_strasbou...
Only SBG1 was built from containers, it partially burnt due to its proximity to SBG2, but its SBG2, which was not built from containers, that burnt down.
I maintain an open-source React portfolio template that deploys to GitHub Pages, and git-as-the-deploy-mechanism is by far the biggest drop-off point for non-developer users. People who can happily edit a config file still abandon at "commit and push". Drag-and-drop a folder is not a worse workflow, it is a different audience, and supporting both is probably cheap here.
On the actual pitch: the thing I would want spelled out on the landing page is where the build runs, not just where the files are served from. Plenty of "European hosting" still runs CI on US infrastructure, and for anyone picking this for data-residency reasons that is the part that decides it.
Needs to also run on European CPUs such as SiPearl Rhea1 :)
The spacing of every element on the site is different and inconsistent.
Everything about this site looks cheap and unconsidered.
Design is important and builds (or loses) trust.
It would take you at most an hour to make this site actually look nice.
Having said that, wrapping is a totally acceptable way to display menus rather than sticking everything in a burger.
Also, at least according to the docs, ssh cert based authentication and password based authentication, but no support for public key based authentication?
I'm so tired.
i agree with your sentiment though.
If I have to choose US or EU to host my website, the size of their army, the strength of their currency, or their history as political bullies doesn't affect my blog or nextcloud instance.
What affects me is their privacy and data harvesting laws. EU is nominally better with the former, but the latter is eroding very fast and they're roughly the same.
Citation needed. Some politicians keep on pushing for data harvesting and secret backdoors and what not but most attempts have been blocked and we're still nowhere near the level like, e.g., in the US.
This website also has a pricing model that is a bit discouraging and quite common in my experience. Nice free tier, thanks, but the first paid tier is a bit far out of reach or not worthy. My only guess is that they are forced to do it this way to fund the free tier.
Also hardly anyone drinks $9 coffees regularly.
Yes
> And would rather pay 9 euros/month?
No
I self-host my application so I don't have need for such service but if I couldn't I would pay 9€
Keep your 500€, your fellow citizens in average need it more than average European
I'd go with sourcehut's pages @ €4 per month over statichost if I wanted to specifically go EU. (If not I'd go with nearlyfreespeech for $2ish per month.)
UK is neither.
That being said, the only reference to the EU is the domain itself - everything else says European, and the UK didn't move during Brexit.
I logged into CF dashboard the other day and was super confused because it appears to be replaced by Workers.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/full-stack-development-on-cloudf...
Computer > Workers & Pages > Create Application > under “Make something new” container there’s a link “Continue to Pages”
Stuff like Astro comes with Workers support.
They also have https://www.cloudflare.com/drop/
An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth.
?!
statichost.eu is a CDN,[0] not a single static host. Your VPS is the single point of failure, so if that one system goes down, your site is offline.
With a VPS, you'd also have to roll your own atomic updates, which is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's also not trivial.
Compare it to static hosting pricing at Netlify, Firebase Hosting, and Vercel, and it's competitive, but you should expect to pay more for a service run by a small vendor who doesn't have the economies of scale or VC money that the bigger competitors have.
[0] They're an abstraction on top of Bunny, who provides the actual CDN, statichost assumes responsibility for providing the CDN regardless of underlying infrastructure.
All this to say that 9€/month is way too expensive.
I get frustrated that people seem pretty aware of the enshittification and centralization of large services, but when an indie vendor pops up that can fill a niche, people expect it to have all the bells and whistles of a billion dollar company and also give everything away for free.
If you have a just for fun website, then yeah, hop around the free tiers of whatever hosting service. If you're running any kind of online business, the difference between free and 9€/month for web hosting is a rounding error to pretty much any other business expenses you have.
Also, keep in mind that on the 9€/month plan, that's the max you pay. With Vercel, Netlify, Firebase, etc., if you get hit with a bot attack, they come after you for $100k+ and you have to beg on social media for them to call off the collectors.[0]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus...
What I see is some homemade service that costs $125/year and has little to show for it. There's nothing about what it offers on the website, the homepage has a handful of words. It claims "CDN" but doesn't say anything about what the exit points are. All I see is two "datacenters" in Northern Europe on the status page.
Heck even the CDN is in "private beta" so what are we paying for exactly? Lots of services in Europe are already available for 2-5€/month for the current level of service.
What I see is a 9€ ask for a list of promises. That's too much.
From the pricing FAQ[0]:
> Can I set a spending limit for overages?
> Yes. Please contact support in order to set up your spending limit.
None of the others support spending limits last I checked.
Yikes
My tiny website doesn’t need a CDN and doesn’t need atomic updates.
I don't understand what you mean. surge.sh and statichost.eu are both small vendors that offer redundancy. Are you saying they're not really small or not really offering N+2 reliability?
As I mentioned upthread, statichost.eu uses Bunny under the covers, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that Bunny isn't a CDN.
surge.sh has servers in 10 regions.[0]
It's not trivial to run a static host with redundancy in multiple regions, but it's also not so absurdly complex that only large vendors can achieve it.
Just checked again and found a DEV configuration for ~€6.55 and STARDUST for ~€0.43 which is interesting.
Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)
I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.
I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.
It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?
There are apps you use to scan products in the store to make sure they have nothing to do with USA.
Seems really cool!
Knowing that, it seems important to have some limits.
I wonder if they have some form of clanker protection. I'd hate to get hit by the filthy buggers and end up with a huge bill.
I'll bookmark it just for that.
Come on, even the claim is sloppified! It's not this, it's that!
Er, what? A static site has no build on server.
I built locally for many many years and I’m much happier with this model since the commit log is a much better reflection of what changed and there are no inconsistencies as whenever you’d commit source and built artifacts that don’t match.
… It demands some extra care in terms of making sure the server can pull the dependencies and run the build scripts, but that also means my colleagues (or me in the future recovering the project from the repo) would be able to build with what was commited and nothing more… which is a requirement in my case.
Immediately blocked for half year until they think if you can have that site.
Meanwhile, Europe's most promising aerospace company just left for USA.
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
But "European values" seems to be a non-statement.
Doesn't European also possibly mean St. Petersburg, Malta, Cyprus, Istanbul, Greenland, or Switzerland? I.e. being not the same as EU hosting?
Low effort comment.
Regarding "European values", I think they are just Western values but with a twist away from the US version. In my layman view, that means: Europe values citizen privacy more, US values citizen freedoms more, Europe values environment more, US values businesses more.
Until recently I would have said Europe values diplomacy more, while US values military power more. But now I dont know about that.