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Ask HN: Best static web site host?

4 points| danvoell | 12 years ago | reply

I'm trying to figure out the best place to host a static (html/php) company web site. I'm looking for a good combination of render speed, up-time, support, and price. I'm currently using shared web hosting on dreamhost and I just want to make sure that I'm not missing out on a faster host which may potentially help Google rankings. Suggestions?

10 comments

[+] byoung2|12 years ago|reply

If it is truly static, just use S3 (and optionally Cloudfront). If you need PHP, look at putting Cloufront in front of your existing shared hosting, or better, get a VPS and run Varnish in front of Apache with Cloudfront.

You can set up rules in Cloudfront to point to different origins based on URL, so you could point at an S3 bucket for /about or /news pages, or the /images* folder, and to your PHP server for /contact or /blog. That way you have maximum uptime for all the static pages and content, and you only hit your server for stuff that absolutely needs to be dynamic.

[+] mattkrea|12 years ago|reply

I'd just go S3 for static content though I pay for two DigitalOcean droplets to run some dynamic content.

[+] buugs|12 years ago|reply

PHP isn't static but NearlyFreeSpeech has been a good host for me (cheap and easy as long as you don't mind ssh). They do have php and mysql if needed.

If actually static (just html and other static files): S3 might be a better choice.

[+] MrGando|12 years ago|reply

I'm on Digital Ocean, for the money my server didn't have any issues handling being in the Top posts of HN for several hours...

I'm serving static HTML generated by Octopress.

[+] danvoell|12 years ago|reply

Thanks for the comment. It seems like there were several digital ocean comments, I will give it a try.

[+] tehwebguy|12 years ago|reply

I'm using github for my personal site, not sure if it's good for something larger / higher traffic.

[+] pinup|12 years ago|reply

Depends on the geographic location of the largest reader base you want to reach. Try to figure out where you biggest reader base are living and just get hosting there.