Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

[shovel]

I still use Wordpress and shared hosting for most projects and microsites, simply because it's easiest and I'm not a developer. But I suspect there are better ways to do this in 2016/2017. Especially since I'm prepared to learn more.

Essentials: static hosting, custom domains, html, css, js Nice to have: php, FTP, markdown support

Am I missing out on AWS, Github, Digital Ocean, Heroku?

What are the pros and cons?

[K0nserv]

I use Github to host the source for my blog/website which is open source. Jekyll for the building which happens on Travis CI. Deployment on S3 with cloudflare as a CDN for SSL and reduced bandwidth. I really like this setup. I wrote a guide called The One Cent Blog[0] a while back detailing how it's setup. Typical months the cost is around $0.01-$0.03.

Becuase people usually ask why S3 over Github pages I'll answer it up front. Github pages is too limited in terms of what you can do with custom jekyll plugins and code.

0: https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html

[vanderZwan]

I have a soft spot for Neocities, which is trying to be everything we loved about Geocities, but for a modern age:

https://neocities.org/

ZERO ADVERTISEMENTS, even for the free plan. Supports only static hosting, is free for 100mb websites with bandwidth of 50GB per month, or five dollars per month for 10,000mb with 2TB and a number of other extra features.

EDIT: As mentioned by detaro, custom domain only supported in the paid plan, see https://neocities.org/supporter

Works really well with creative coding frameworks like p5js or Twine, for fun, fast little sketches you just want to thrown online and share with others:

http://p5js.org/

http://twinery.org/

Also, they really care about resurrecting the ideals of the old internet:

https://blog.neocities.org/its-time-for-the-permanent-web.ht...

https://blog.neocities.org/default-ssl.html

[newscracker]

Nearly Free Speech (nearlyfreespeech.net aka NFSN). [1] I'd strongly recommend you try it, without purchasing a domain, and see for yourself how far the initial trial takes you (you get a 25 cent credit when you create an account). Even if you decide to try something else, it's worth your time to read NFSN's FAQ [2] to know more about the service and policies. It's quite impressive.

Advantages:

1. Excluding domain costs, which are reasonable (and even cheaper than many others), you can have small static sites for pennies a month, or even pennies a year if you put the free tier of CloudFlare in front of it (with DNS changes). It's really dirt cheap!

2. It's the most honest service I've seen, where you pay close to what you actually use.

3. The owner/admin is a no-nonsense person and is available on the forums to help with things that don't need extensive support involvement.

Disadvantages:

1. You need to be tech savvy (at least know how to use an FTP client to upload your static files and use the BSD shell if you wish to play around with application setup or other things over ssh). NFSN does not have any fancy control panels (like cPanel) where you can do one click installs of WordPress or other applications.

2. For PHP and MySQL based applications, setup is not difficult at all. But if you want any other application server (like Node or Rails or Django), you would have to do more work to get it set up.

3. If you truly need support, then there's a paid support subscription (it's optional). For most requirements the forums would suffice.

4. If your site grows a lot (in terms of disk space used, network traffic used and resources used), then NFSN could become very expensive compared to the commonly oversold $5 a month or $10 a month services that promise a lot but depend on most users not reaching their promised limits.

[1]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

[2]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq

[nodejs-news]

I'm a great self-hosting fan, behind my DSL connection using 2 x RaspberryPI. I have 3 static web sites, 2 with Jekyll, 1 with Hugo, with great perf :

checkout webpagetest -> https://www.webpagetest.org/result/161123_0R_8RDY/

and feel free to check my 3 web sites:

- http://www.it-wars.com - http://www.louer-hendaye.com - http://www.nodejs-news.com

Init : 2 RaspberryPi + electric plugs : 2x 30$ + 2 x6$ Monthly bill: electricity : about nothing DSL : 30$

Enjoy!

[throwaway2016a]

Just to echo... Amazon S3 with CloudFront. No contest. CloudFront has free SSL too. Then AWS Lambda to provide dynamic content via Javascript / API if needed.

If you want to get fancy you can even attach it to your domain root (example.com vs www.example.com) using Route53. Which is impossible with many static hosts. Although that requires a hosted Route53 zone which at $2 might very well be 100x your hosting costs.

I use Jenkins to generate the website itself.

Edit: Only downside is if your traffic spikes you have no control over the cost. There is no upper bounds. With that said, it would take a tremendous amount of traffic to balloon the costs to anything worth worrying about. And at least you can be sure your website will actually stay up.

[kyledrake]

I'm biased, but Neocities (https://neocities.org) can do all of these things and is a great choice for static web hosting. We run a global anycast CDN with instant cache purging, custom domains with Let's Encrypt SSL, high availability architecture, and all the rest. We haven't had a full site hosting outage in years.

We include 10GB storage 2TB BW for free (more of both included soon) for $5/mo, which would cost over $180/mo at AWS with S3. Cloud providers really upcharge on bandwidth big time. Really that 2TB is just a soft cap just to make sure nobody tries to run the New York Times from a $5 hosting plan. Many people go over it and it's not a problem.

The one thing we don't do well is show how good we are for pro hosting as well as people learning HTML and having fun. I need to work on that.

[seanwilson]

I use GitHub pages with Cloudflare (free CDN + HTTPS) for simpler sites but I'm a fan of netlify.com right now. Setup is simple, atomic deploys are simple, rollbacks are simple, caching + cache invalidation + HTTPS is done for you and there's paid plans if you need passwords, form submissions and custom response headers. There's probably cheaper options compared to the paid plan at $9 a month but you have to ask yourself how much your time is worth in comparison if you're burning just 1 hour a month on configuring your hosting.

Deploying over S3 sounds like a bunch of hassle to me. Can you deploy atomically? Can you rollback?

[gtsteve]

I use AWS S3, which I put behind a Cloudfront distribution. It's quick to set up, and there are no servers to keep up to date and patched. You also get free SSL for your Cloudfront distribution via AWS certificate manager. For stuff like Contact Us forms, I use AWS Lambda to post the data into my company's CMS. We've had this setup for about a year now and it works quite well.

The cost is almost nothing but we don't have a high traffic website. If you started getting billions of hits from expensive Cloudfront regions such as Australia or India, you might consider something else.

[thunfisch]

Uberspace.de

Shell Access, pretty much every common language available, service running, databases, mail, etc..

No bullshit hosting in germany, Pay what you want (1€/month minimum).

Absolute best, I'm hosting about 25 projects with them for various bands, etc. and haven't had any problems whatsoever.

[hashtagMERKY]

For static sites I used to use surge [0], but now I use Neltify [1] for my site [2], because it offers free SSL on your own domain, and continuous deployment from a GitHub or Gitlab repository. You can set your own build options, for example to build Jekyll.

(I have no affiliation with Netlify I just think their service is neat.)

[0] https://surge.sh/

[1] https://www.netlify.com/

[2] https://gilly.tk

edit: formatting

[reimertz]

Github Pages + cloudflare + travis

why: free, cdn, version-controlled, continuous integration, https, custom domains.

[oliver2213]

I use a cheap $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet with nginx, Nikola [0], and letsencrypt for ssl. Works great and I can expand easily if I want to add php or other wsgi apps.

[0] https://getnikola.com

[theandrewbailey]

I have a PC in my basement on a nice 150meg fiber connection. I have a dynamic DNS service and client set up, and ports forwarded. At this point, I can do whatever the hell I want (static or dynamic), as long as I don't transfer like 10TB a month.

I have Payara (java app server) running my blog down there, and HTTPS courtesy of Let's Encrypt. I looked into running a Open Street Maps server, but it was fairly hard (I might have been close to getting it running), and professional reasons for maybe playing around with it changed.

[user5994461]

Wordpress.com or Blogger.com

Fully operational, all the important stuff (text editors, analytics, pictures hosting...), nice themes, well indexed by google, zero maintenance, free, and unlimited traffic.

I run blogs so obviously it is particularly appropriate. But that works as well for small static sites with a couple pages.

[tiernano]

as a few people have mentioned, NearlyFreeSpeech.net is my static host of choice. i use them for static blogs (jekyll built) and they work perfectly. non static sites get charged at 1c per day (and you get a MySQL instance for about 1c a day, give or take), and static has no charge per day. you are billed for bandwidth and storage, and can have multiple sites in one account. SSH/SFTP access available also.

[fao_]

I generally use nearlyfreespeech.net

I added about 5 gbp two years ago and it's down to about 4 gbp. It's cheap as hell and I only have to dump 5 pounds on there every few years or so.

[CyberFonic]

I use Google AppEngine with Python SDK. Whilst it is intended for web apps (and I use it for that too) it works well serving up static content alone. Very easy to add interactivity as and when the need arises. Also has access to Google Cloud services.

I like that I can check my changes on my notebook before uploading to the cloud.

[eximius]

NearlyFreeSpeech - fantastic business, incredibly cheap. My domain costs are more than my hosting costs (I pay roughly $2.50 a month for hosting a forum).

[d0lph]

RamNode: 128MB RAM 15GB storage, $15/year. Cheapest I have found yet for a tiny VPS.

Perfect for static pages, but a little bit of PHP might be fine.

[antihero]

I think I'd go with DigitalOcean $5/mo, nginx, a static site generator (there's so many), and LetsEncrypt (for SSL).

[tyingq]

Gitlab pages (https://pages.gitlab.io/) is free, and has some advantages over Github pages:

- Not restricted to jekyll, use any static generator

- Supports https on custom domains

[Animats]

I'm still using Dreamweaver 8 and pushing the site to a server as static files.

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver 8's static SFTP doesn't work any more, due to some Microsoft-forced change in Windows 7.

[jdmoreira]

I'm very happy with the service at https://www.scaleway.com

[iUsedToCode]

I use linuxpl.com (https://linuxpl.com/Hosting-Serwery-wirtualne) which is ~ 12 usd / year (so just $1/ month). Comes with 2 GB of space and 50 gb bandwidth per month.

SSH access, shared hosting (so pretty powerful CPU/ram there). Currently i have about 700 daily unique visitors and growing. Used to deploy custom sites, now i use mostly wordpress. Also, i use it for my git remote repos.

Great service. Been using if for years, awesome quality for the money.

Lately had some issues but the support is helpful and they fixed whatever i wanted, enabling SSI, fixing response headers, etc. Never had to wait for a reply longer than 6 hours (usually it's just minutes, really). As a bonus, admin staff is available through odlschool IM app - Gadu-Gadu. And PHP 7 is available and easy to switch to.

The site's in polish, which sucks for you guys, but it's by far the cheapest and best solution i have for low cost hosting. I'm a happy customer.

[teekert]

I use Nginx either on my basement server (I have 50/50 fiber internet at home) or I use one of my digital ocean droplets, which can be as cheap as 5$ a month, that is less than my server at home uses in power. A Raspberry pi would also suffice if there is not too much traffic I guess, that would cost you about 10€ a year in power. Running a whole server means there is no limit to the amount of sites you can run (apart from memory and bandwidth of course.)

Both my servers (DO vps and basement) run Ubuntu 16.04, I use PHP-fpm for PHP, domains I purchase at a local registrar (.nl domains are about 10€/year), for ssl I use lets encrypt. For simple sites I always use Bootstrap for the css.

FTP is implicit if you count SFTP as FTP (FTP over SSH). Under Linux SFTP is mounted as easily as any network share.

At home I run a Nextcloud instance and share some directories as Nginx roots, that means I can locally (even on my phone) edit a static web page and it is synced immediately to the webserver's root folder. This can be quite convenient.

[planetjones]

dreamhost.

I manage all my sites there. Never had any issues with them, there is SSH access too so I recently set up a Hugo bitbucket pipeline which builds my personal website and rysncs it to dreamhost.

They were very fast to add lets encrypt support, so all that stuff is taken care automagically. Reliability is very good.

[rntz]

www.nearlyfreespeech.net is cheap (really cheap, hence the name) and reliable - they've been around since 2002, and I've used them since 2008.

[cklar]

For static sites I use firebase hosting, quite simple to use and it includes a free SSL certificate https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/

[lazyjones]

I host my static stuff (with my own domains) at FastMail, it's included in my "standard" plan. Upload is possible via FTP and DAV, the quota is currently 5GB disk space, 2GB or 80K files daily traffic.

[oDot]

StockDroids.com is hosted on S3 and served using Cloudfront. It's pretty easy to get going if you don't mind getting a little technical.

Not sure how price compares to the competition, though. HN's + /r/Android's front pages resulted in about 13K uniques and it ended up costing me ~$10 (which is insanely cheap, but GitHub + Cloudfront is free...)

Edit: I should mention that the site isn't as light it can be, currently stands at 473kb of code and about 3 megs of images. So that $10 is for ~45 gigs of traffic.

[jordanlev]

If you want PHP and FTP, I've been successfully using webfaction <https://www.webfaction.com/> for years now (they're a developer-friendly shared host). $10/month. Their setup is a little weird to figure out at first (they add an extra layer of indirection between domain names and applications), but once you get it it makes it very easy to set up new sites.

[duggan]

Github Pages with CNAME file, CircleCI, Cloudflare. Free, CDN, and SSL hosted if it's all open source.

No how-to, but it's all open source here https://github.com/barricadeio/docs

Most awkward part was figuring out the voodoo required to get Hugo and Middleman working (lots of trial and error).

[Rabidgremlin]

I use an S3 bucket. I have a Docker image that pulls Markdown out of git, runs Hugo over it and pushes the site to an S3 bucket. I set it up to work with Bitbucket pipelines so I get a site rebuild with a simple git push: https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3