I love static websites. Most of our YC websites are static (www, startupschool, femalefounders, fellowship, etc.) Problem is I'm not sure we've really seem any great innovation here in regards to nontechnical adoption since MovableType. I know we have Jekyll and Middleman and those are fantastic pieces of software for developers (we use Middleman here at YC), but they're missing a UI bridge to get people to the promise land.
Your current implementation...I'm not so sure it can reach nontechnical people yet. I think it sits at this middle point that makes it easy for technical people to hand off content management to nontechnical people. That's probably a good / smart way to start...but it will limit your potential audience.
Looking at the site, I don't think targeting a technology is the best approach. People aren't going to be Googling "alternatives to cpanel" to try and find you. You should be targeting people / use cases. Designers, creative agencies, IT people dealing with the marketing team, etc.
The zip a folder and upload is a great interface (A+ on giving me a sample project to try), but what I'm most interested in is how the CMS / form stuff is going to work. Unfortunately, it wasn't ready yet. I will say that adding classname is a good start, but remember try to build features in a way that it doesn't require people to edit code. Find some way to allow people to click to specify what'll be dynamic. It could use the same mechanism, just make adding the classname a thing that's done with a click and not a cursor.
The CMS / Form stuff is what's really going to sell this into organizations. Then you're going after a very large space. I think something like 45% of the Internet is powered by a CMS. 25% of that by Wordpress, something initially made for some other task. If someone gets it right, there's a lot of money to be made.
Thanks for sharing and I'll be on the look out for your fellowship application!
We are working on an editing interface for static websites that can compete with the ease of use and flexibility of wordpress. Our alpha users love it and this is an open source project.
We've been working in this space for quite a while, and are extremely excited about the potential for static web-tech.
We started out with simple drag and drop deploys at BitBalloon (you don't even need to zip your site first, just drag a folder unto BitBalloon.com).
Later we launched our premium solution called netlify that's by far the most feature rich on the market (continuous deployment, form processing, API proxying, redirects, rewrite rules, SSL, etc, etc) and offers the best performance you'll get today.
It's spot on that the really big deal will be solving the CMS need, without making developers give up on all the advantages of static site generators.
Some of our larger clients are using netlify + roots/middleman/metalsmith/etc + Contentful/Prismic/etc to build large CMS drives sites that are built up front and hosted directly on our CDN, but this is still a bit too advances a setup for the millions and millions of normal CMS driven sites out there.
Our solution is building a completely open-source CMS that works with all common static site generators. It's in private beta right now, but getting real close to opening up the repo to the public. It’s completely free of any lock-in, and you can take it and host it anywhere with ease.
Happy to send an invite to anyone here. Just ping me at [email protected]
Some feedback to the product of this thread:
Love the initiative.
Drag and drop uploads are nice, but unless you handle CDN configuration and cache invalidation, it doesn't seem like a big step up from just FTPing files to an S3 bucket.
Otherwise you might risk mainly appealing to beginners or people looking for a cheap way to publish a personal website, and those can't pay much. With a monthly price of $1/site, the life-time value of a client will be very low, so you will barely be able to spend anything on customer acquisition. One.com, GoDaddy or S3 can offer extremely low prices because they have huge scale, but as a tiny startup, you have no way of reaching the amount of users you would need to get on board with a model like that. Especially since this is way more technical than Wix/Weebly/SquareSpace,etc, while not really offering real value to professional developers or agencies.
If you want to build in the static hosting space, you should start by figuring out if there's something you could offer beyond what the existing players like netlify, BitBalloon, CloudCannon, Divshot, etc, already have, and make sure you're not just trying to compete on price.
Co-creator here. We built forestry.io because we hate dealing with shitty cPanel-type hosting providers and we think WordPress is often overkill for simple sites.
We all build simple sites every now and then. You know...your bother's band, your friend's restaurant, etc. They're a pain to set up and manage.
This is just a demo, but we would love your feedback!
*YC people - put in a good word for us for the fellowship program ;)
What about Divshot, BitBalloon, Netlify and Github Pages? Between the 4 of those, there's a range of prices and functionality that fit pretty much any need.
Note that the goal of this question is to help you explain what makes you unique, not to as a gotcha. I'd like to get an idea of when your offering is the appropriate choice since I'm looking at needing a static webhost in the next few months.
Looks great, but I'll never fork over cash for a service that doesn't even have an imprint. I don't care about ToC, but I want to see that somebody with a name is behind this thing.
Edit: Another thing: What about email? The beauty of cPanel and whatnot is that it comes with email to my domain and is usually easy to set up as well.
It is truly tragic how much heat and energy is wasted in the world by static websites requiring to run huge piles of horrendous PHP to render their unchanging contents from a database through Wordpress on every request.
I like this idea a lot. The form submission and editing features sound very interesting and could potentially offer a nice middle ground for one-off landing pages and the like that don't need an app server but are too custom for page generators like unbounce or instapage. Blogging this way could also be great, but there's a lot more work to do on features before you can start to compete with DB-backed solutions. I eagerly await the day that I can confidently recommend a platform like this to a client over Wordpress.
I get that the drag and drop upload is good for non-technical folks, but as a coder, some sort of little command line interface ala Heroku would be nice so that I could use it alongside git in my workflow and automate deploys. The drag and drop process would be tedious when doing frequent deploys.
Have you looked at Middleman at all? That's been my static site generator of choice for awhile now and I've found it much smoother to work with than Jekyll.
This is awesome. It might be just what I was looking for. However their site's animation is too abrupt and distracting. They need to reduce the frequency of changes a bit.
It vaguely reminds me of Site44[1] - which does with DropBox what you are doing with your zip upload. Your pricing is better. And they don't have forms. This one simple thing adds the only back-end functionality needed by well over 1/3 of the web sites out there today.
Agreed, I did not look further seeing heroku there. One of the thoughts that came to mind is maybe this is spinning up dynos for you. Hopefully not hosting many sites under 1 dyno
Agreed. cPanel hosting services make me want to vomit (bluehost/hostgator/etc). The thing that bothers me the most, is we often set up WordPress so someone can edit a few lines of text ever few months. Total overkill IMO.
One of the main reasons to use wordpress is that it allows lay people to customize the look and feel of their website. Sure hosting is a problem, but likely the bigger problem is building easy to use tools to make their website looks pretty and functional.
In my experience, people get a web dev to crank out a simple website powered by WP and they only ever really make slight content changes - add a project to their portfolio, or edit their bio. Rarely to people actually make use of widgets, plugins or new themes.
Weebly has a free plan but you can't actually use your own domain with it[0] and your site is weebly branded. It's $8/month to remove the branding and add your domain.
[+] [-] kevin|10 years ago|reply
Your current implementation...I'm not so sure it can reach nontechnical people yet. I think it sits at this middle point that makes it easy for technical people to hand off content management to nontechnical people. That's probably a good / smart way to start...but it will limit your potential audience.
Looking at the site, I don't think targeting a technology is the best approach. People aren't going to be Googling "alternatives to cpanel" to try and find you. You should be targeting people / use cases. Designers, creative agencies, IT people dealing with the marketing team, etc.
The zip a folder and upload is a great interface (A+ on giving me a sample project to try), but what I'm most interested in is how the CMS / form stuff is going to work. Unfortunately, it wasn't ready yet. I will say that adding classname is a good start, but remember try to build features in a way that it doesn't require people to edit code. Find some way to allow people to click to specify what'll be dynamic. It could use the same mechanism, just make adding the classname a thing that's done with a click and not a cursor.
The CMS / Form stuff is what's really going to sell this into organizations. Then you're going after a very large space. I think something like 45% of the Internet is powered by a CMS. 25% of that by Wordpress, something initially made for some other task. If someone gets it right, there's a lot of money to be made.
Thanks for sharing and I'll be on the look out for your fellowship application!
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
Agreed that focusing on technical people is a smaller market; that's just phase 1 for us. Thanks a bunch!
[+] [-] bosdev|10 years ago|reply
You might want to take a look at Eager (https://eager.io)
[+] [-] bobfunk|10 years ago|reply
We are working on an editing interface for static websites that can compete with the ease of use and flexibility of wordpress. Our alpha users love it and this is an open source project.
We've been working in this space for quite a while, and are extremely excited about the potential for static web-tech.
We started out with simple drag and drop deploys at BitBalloon (you don't even need to zip your site first, just drag a folder unto BitBalloon.com).
Later we launched our premium solution called netlify that's by far the most feature rich on the market (continuous deployment, form processing, API proxying, redirects, rewrite rules, SSL, etc, etc) and offers the best performance you'll get today.
It's spot on that the really big deal will be solving the CMS need, without making developers give up on all the advantages of static site generators.
Some of our larger clients are using netlify + roots/middleman/metalsmith/etc + Contentful/Prismic/etc to build large CMS drives sites that are built up front and hosted directly on our CDN, but this is still a bit too advances a setup for the millions and millions of normal CMS driven sites out there.
Our solution is building a completely open-source CMS that works with all common static site generators. It's in private beta right now, but getting real close to opening up the repo to the public. It’s completely free of any lock-in, and you can take it and host it anywhere with ease.
Happy to send an invite to anyone here. Just ping me at [email protected]
Some feedback to the product of this thread:
Love the initiative.
Drag and drop uploads are nice, but unless you handle CDN configuration and cache invalidation, it doesn't seem like a big step up from just FTPing files to an S3 bucket.
Otherwise you might risk mainly appealing to beginners or people looking for a cheap way to publish a personal website, and those can't pay much. With a monthly price of $1/site, the life-time value of a client will be very low, so you will barely be able to spend anything on customer acquisition. One.com, GoDaddy or S3 can offer extremely low prices because they have huge scale, but as a tiny startup, you have no way of reaching the amount of users you would need to get on board with a model like that. Especially since this is way more technical than Wix/Weebly/SquareSpace,etc, while not really offering real value to professional developers or agencies.
If you want to build in the static hosting space, you should start by figuring out if there's something you could offer beyond what the existing players like netlify, BitBalloon, CloudCannon, Divshot, etc, already have, and make sure you're not just trying to compete on price.
My 5 cents written in 5 minutes :) Good Luck!
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
We all build simple sites every now and then. You know...your bother's band, your friend's restaurant, etc. They're a pain to set up and manage.
This is just a demo, but we would love your feedback!
*YC people - put in a good word for us for the fellowship program ;)
[+] [-] sokoloff|10 years ago|reply
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...
[+] [-] curun1r|10 years ago|reply
Note that the goal of this question is to help you explain what makes you unique, not to as a gotcha. I'd like to get an idea of when your offering is the appropriate choice since I'm looking at needing a static webhost in the next few months.
[+] [-] WA|10 years ago|reply
Edit: Another thing: What about email? The beauty of cPanel and whatnot is that it comes with email to my domain and is usually easy to set up as well.
[+] [-] gkoberger|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eliben|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChristianBach|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchendy|10 years ago|reply
https://pages.github.com/
[+] [-] danenania|10 years ago|reply
I get that the drag and drop upload is good for non-technical folks, but as a coder, some sort of little command line interface ala Heroku would be nice so that I could use it alongside git in my workflow and automate deploys. The drag and drop process would be tedious when doing frequent deploys.
Have you looked at Middleman at all? That's been my static site generator of choice for awhile now and I've found it much smoother to work with than Jekyll.
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
Blogging will be difficult, right now we're just starting with editing existing content and we'll expand from there.
[+] [-] progx|10 years ago|reply
$39 / year for a simple "cms" (others call it a simple edit form)
$11 / year for form handling
---
$62 / year, good luck! Include the simple cms would be a great benefit.
Sure WordPress is overbloatet, but WordPress has zillions of Designs.
[+] [-] rojabuck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salimmadjd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ci5er|10 years ago|reply
It vaguely reminds me of Site44[1] - which does with DropBox what you are doing with your zip upload. Your pricing is better. And they don't have forms. This one simple thing adds the only back-end functionality needed by well over 1/3 of the web sites out there today.
[1] http://www.site44.com/
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aikah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcameron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcheung|10 years ago|reply
"Set up" not "Setup". Just one of my pet peeves. Had to say it.
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leo_mck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
http://forestry.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=258a7a7e662...
[+] [-] jdubs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgallant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msny|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] packetized|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpatters|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.weebly.com/#plans/compare
[+] [-] freeslugs|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CleverMate|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] selamis|10 years ago|reply
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