Comment by masnick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masnick | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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!)

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com