Forge - Static hosting made simple | Hacker News Reader

Forge - Static hosting made simple

getforge.com

19 pointselliottkember50 comments

It seems to me like the set of people who (a) can make a static HTML site and (b) can't figure out to use Amazon S3 or GitHub Pages or a traditional host like http://nearlyfreespeech.net is quite small. But it seems like this is the set of people static hosting services are targeting, or am I missing something?

It's worth noting that you can get more or less the same functionality hosting a static site on Amazon S3 with a free CloudFlare account for CDN + JavaScript/CSS minification. Unless your site has tens of thousands of visitors a month, S3 will be essentially free -- it would take a LOT of traffic to cost more than $10/month.

Uploading the site to S3 is marginally more difficult than uploading to Forge, but if you can write HTML you can probably use one of the many GUI S3 upload tools.

I'm not trying to be a jerk about this -- I'm genuinely curious who the target customer is and how Forge (and similar sites) differentiate themselves from existing services. What problem is Forge solving?

(One way Forge is definitely different is great UI design. Props to whoever did their design work!)

I think you're pretty spot on in your analyses though. We use static sites for our landing pages (currently using Jekyll, Grunt & S3) and I can't see a real reason to switch to something like this.

From a business standpoint I worry Forge will have a really hard time building a sustainable business off of $10 / month / user. That's a lot of users they'll need to build something profitable. There is likely room here though for add-on services or some unique features.

Curious to learn more about TurboJS as well.

Thanks!

It's probably also worth noting specifically that CloudFlare offers some JS optimization/preloading features: https://www.cloudflare.com/features-optimizer

One is in beta and one is for Pro accounts only.

Hey there! I'm Forge's lead developer. We're targeting people who want to set up a site, but don't want to set up a server or use Amazon's admin panels.

For example, many front-end developers and designers struggle with things like S3 buckets, setting up cloudfront, minifying assets and images, and keeping a version history.

If you're a developer like me or you, Forge is useful because it's one less tool that you have to mess with to host your site. Simple, easy, everything in one place. I hate using the S3 admin panel and wanted to build something I'd enjoy using.

Thanks for your reply!

I definitely agree that all things AWS are terrible in terms of learning curve and usability. It's easy to forget how unintuitive setting up static hosting on S3 is (bucket policies, ugh).

So I guess your real competition is either (a) GitHub as that becomes more accessible to non-developers or (b) traditional FTP-accessible web servers. There's definitely room for improvement in both.

Best of luck to you with your launch.

(One of your competitors has a really neat feature that magically makes static web forms work -- https://www.bitballoon.com/. This seems like a great feature that really sets a hosting service apart from a FTP-accessible web server. Making a contact form is non-trivial, much more so than using FTP IMO.)

> It's easy to forget how unintuitive setting up static hosting on S3 is (bucket policies, ugh).

Yeah, exactly. There are a lot of services available for this, but precious few really nice ones.

> So I guess your real competition is either (a) GitHub as that becomes more accessible to non-developers or (b) traditional FTP-accessible web servers. There's definitely room for improvement in both.

It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's appeal to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an app like Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into the Terminal and type Git commands.

> (One of your competitors has a really neat feature that magically makes static web forms work -- https://www.bitballoon.com/. This seems like a great feature that really sets a hosting service apart from a FTP-accessible web server. Making a contact form is non-trivial, much more so than using FTP IMO.)

Yes, I've just checked it out. Definitely a useful feature and something we've often considered. Good to have some competition, I guess.

> It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's appeal to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an app like Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into the Terminal and type Git commands.

I think GitHub is moving in that direction. We're not talking about the general public here -- we're talking about people who can write HTML. There's not a big stretch from that to working on a static site via the GitHub website (you can create/edit/delete files online now).

For a single-person project, the GitHub for Mac app is probably easy enough for at least some non-devs to figure out. I've got some of my non-dev friends to use it for sharing statistical analysis code. It's not perfect but it's doable.

With that said, I definitely see where you're coming from now.

Sorry everybody! We hit our Heroku database limit unexpectedly. We're hesitant to upgrade while our initial launch traffic hits so are maintaining the site manually. Sites hosted on Forge are elsewhere and performing just fine.

That seems to be a bit short sighted to me. You're turning off potential users because your site is down and you have an easy fix for the problem? Seems like a bad strategy to me...

I'm torn between upvoting this for visibility and downvoting it for being dumb.

You can go ahead and downvote it since it's all fixed now. Worse yet, the migration ended up only taking two minutes, so downvote this one while you're at it.

So you were running on the starter databases? Slick.

Ouch. I've been on the receiving end of Heroku outages during heavy traffic, it's zero craic. But it happens.

Give the guys a break lads, it's hard to anticipate this. Still, maybe hosting the static front page on... err.. S3 might've kept it up ;)

-Edited for end of day stupidity-

I think the copy could be improved.

The service is obviously not targeted to developers, but several words is:

    > zip-and-deploy with Forge

What's zip? What's deploy?

    > Uploading and deploying static builds is the way it should be.

What's a build? (Yes, there sort of is an explanation underneath, but how do I create a build?)

My suggestion would be to make it less technically sounding.

Agreed, though as others have noted, if you're capable enough to build the static site in the first place you probably get the zip & deploy stuff.

Forge is probably better off selling this to designers or agencies and giving them some multi-site controls.

Too bad their site is down, curious to see it since we just launched BitBalloon https://www.bitballoon.com

Always interesting to see similar services popping up. Too bad about the downtime...

I'm confused by this statement "Your Forge account is billed based on how much bandwidth you use. On our basic plan, if you stay under 10GB each month, you'll only be charged the base rate of $10."

Is it that I only pay for what I use or is it a minimum $10/month charge? Right now with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ (and similar to AWS) I really only pay for what I use. With NFS I deposit money and based on my usage each month money is deducted. Please make it clear if I'm billed on usage or charged a flat rate.

$10/month for 10GB seems really expensive. For example, $5/month for a Digital Ocean VPS includes 1TB transfer. Now, maybe Forge is much faster or more robust, but is it really worth 200x as much per GB?

That's 10GB of CDN bandwidth, which is much faster, and geographically distributed.

It still doesn't make any sense. You can get the same drag and drop deployment with graphical ftp software and 1-click static site deployment. At 1/100th of the cost.

I'm not having an errors accessing the site, however I'm a bit turned off by pricing. $10/m seems steep to me for just hosting static files. I especially don't like that I can't do a git push to deploy updates (breaks my workflow) and having to zip files seems unnecessary. I also don't see any must have features; hosting on a CDN isn't a killer feature and the zip deploy, at least for me, makes it a no go.

That's fine - Forge isn't for everybody. Our target market is front-end developers and designers, or anybody who wants a new, simple workflow. Thanks for checking it out!

Sure - developers can access services that are cheaper than this. Outside of HN developers are a minority though and tools like Dropbox took a tech that was available to techies and brought it to the masses.

Some pointless comments here kicking a person while they are (or their server is) down - I'll never understand that mentality

Congratulations on the launch

Thanks! We really appreciate your comment.

The site is either showing error message, loading really really slow or finally fast as advertised.

Very inconsistent performance. Staying with Amazon CloudFront for static hosting.

One question though, is SSL supported for custom domains? that's the only thing I would be willing to switch from CloudFront for.

Not a very good first impression.

>"This doesn't happen often, but it looks like something is broke." Well, your initial page is broken.

>"Hitting the back button and trying again might be your best bet." Nope, didn't work.

>"If that doesn't work you can head back to the homepage. " That's the page I'm trying to go to!

>"There might be more information on our status page which is reporting All Systems Operational." Yeaah.. No, all systems aren't operational.

Sorry about that - it's up and down at the moment. We only just launched and quickly hit our DB limit. We're waiting to upgrade the database until after the initial traffic wears off as it involves taking the site down completely. Rock and a hard place!

How's this different/better than S3?

I've got two different error messages. The status page has no idea there's anything wrong.

Any more info on TurboJS? Is it open source or proprietary? I'm guessing proprietary to set you guys apart. Site is pretty fast and slick. I enjoy both Hammer and Anvil. Plan on building support into the apps for Forge?

Static hosting seems the rage today. The biggest question is whether value can really be added on top of just hosting static assets. I think you can, but it's not going to be easy. Best of luck.

How about SSL?

I think the cross section of people who want simple hosting, but don't care at all about bandwidth is small.

most of the features provided are only useful to developers as well.

Any way I can see some example sites already hosted with Forge? I've been considering using S3+Cloudfront, and this looks like a cleaner solution!

Sure thing! http://hammerformac.com/, http://anvilformac.com and http://riothq.com/ are all hosted on Forge.

"Application Error"

i didn't know if a static site is an application..

Are there advantages over `git push -u origin gh-pages` that I'm missing?

You don't have to use git?

That's not a feature.

Edit to say that it could be a feature, if a number of vcs options were supported, along with non-vcs things like GridFTP and OPeNDAP, etc.

I feel like I do, personally, but more power to you if others feel otherwise.

You misunderstand me, I like git, but there are lots of people who don't like it, and would much rather be able to do everything with their mouse.

I get you. But while we're all complaining about this let me point out that I use and love Anvil. Thanks!

Haha - I was reading through this whole thread and didn't expect that. Glad you like it.

Free plan without custom domain is useless, no point to test your service.

I think they would prefer you pay

I'm quite satisfied with Github pages and jekyll.

Maybe other people aren't. Maybe they want a more graphical interface.

And, I have no idea, but can you use Github Pages with a private repo? Again, I don't know, but if you can't, this doesn't publish the source publicly.

Isn't your source already public if all you do is host static pages?

Maybe. But you can't make directories that you don't talk about on a public repo, because anyone could go and look at those.

yes you can use it with private repo.

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