
Show HN: Forestry.io – A better way to host static websites (demo) - sgallant
https://forestryio.herokuapp.com
======
kevin
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!

~~~
bobfunk
Founder of netlify and BitBalloon here.

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 matt@netlify.com

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!

~~~
jpatters
The CMS you mentioned sounds pretty cool. I tried to email you to request an
invite but it bounced. Is that the correct email address?

~~~
bobfunk
That's strange! Just tried to send myself a few test mails to that mail, and
it works fine here...

You can try our general mail, info@netlify.com

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sgallant
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 ;)

~~~
sokoloff
My first question would be: why not just use an S3 bucket directly, with web
hosting enabled?

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html)

~~~
sgarg26
It's a good question. Reminds me of the first time I heard about Dropbox - I
thought, 'why not just do a rsync'?

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eliben
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.

~~~
ChristianBach
!!!

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jchendy
What does paid hosting offer than I can't get from GitHub pages for free?

[https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

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danenania
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.

~~~
sgallant
Yeah, I love heroku toolbelt too. A command line tool makes a lot of sense.

Blogging will be difficult, right now we're just starting with editing
existing content and we'll expand from there.

------
progx
$12 / year for a static page

$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.

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rojabuck
Take a look at [http://webhook.com](http://webhook.com) as they have a similar
offering that may give some inspiration.

~~~
salimmadjd
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.

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ci5er
This is very nicely done.

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/](http://www.site44.com/)

~~~
sgallant
Very cool. I wasn't aware of site44. Thanks!

~~~
ci5er
I was a little stunned when I first came across it - and it got my brain to
churning.

I've since then been able to use DropBox to syndicate oil&gas drilling waste
processing equipment configurations from a small set of folders on my desktop.
And I've been able to hook up a national chain's franchise's digital in-store
displays to a content manager's workstation at an ad agency in New York. You
can do quite a few nifty things with it.

And I've taken us off the topic of your demonstration. Sorry! :-)

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aikah
err, would look a bit more professional to at least get a proper domain name .
Are you running on free dyno or what ?

~~~
arcameron
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

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bcheung
"Setup a domain & billing"

"Set up" not "Setup". Just one of my pet peeves. Had to say it.

~~~
sgallant
fixed :)

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ocdtrekkie
This seems pretty cool. I agree a lot of site hosting sold today is insanely
overkill for a lot of users.

~~~
sgallant
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.

~~~
Nadya
This is the perfect use case for my father's website and for the exact reasons
I didn't want to use CPanel or Wordpress for his site.

Nice job filling that small niche of "barebones CMS".

~~~
sgallant
Awesome, we'll be adding some beta customers next week. Sign up here if you
want to be a part of it:

[http://forestry.us11.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=258a7a7e662...](http://forestry.us11.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=258a7a7e66229ee7fff436898&id=377858cce3)

------
leo_mck
Nice idea, I would start using it today to make a couple of sites that people
ask me to do for them.

~~~
sgallant
We'll be inviting beta users next week. Sign up here if you want to be a part
of it:

[http://forestry.us11.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=258a7a7e662...](http://forestry.us11.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=258a7a7e66229ee7fff436898&id=377858cce3)

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jdubs
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.

~~~
sgallant
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.

~~~
eric_bullington
The company that wins the battle to be WordPress's successor will be the one
that builds the same type of thriving plugin/extension ecosystem that allowed
WP to expand so rapidly.

~~~
sgallant
Interesting thoughts. What are your "go-to" WP plugins?

~~~
eric_bullington
Oh, I avoid WP like the plague these days, and strictly use static site
generators like Jekyll and Hugo. In any case, I'm referring less to specific
plugins, and more to the critical importance of bootstrapping and fostering a
thriving plugin marketplace for 3rd-party developers, just like WP did (and
does). I'm surprised that none of the newer players are doing this.

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msny
Looks like a good place to host my personal/portfolio site.

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packetized
Neat, but Weebly is effectively the same thing. For free.

~~~
jpatters
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.

[0]
[http://www.weebly.com/#plans/compare](http://www.weebly.com/#plans/compare)

~~~
packetized
You're right. However, you can't use your own domain with Forestry.io right
now (public beta, with a 'submit your email address to be the first to know'
form). Also, I'm not sure that hosting on Linode will scale as well as
expected for $1/month/user.

