
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&#x27;s easiest and I&#x27;m not a developer. But I suspect there are better ways to do this in 2016&#x2F;2017. Especially since I&#x27;m prepared to learn more.<p>Essentials: static hosting, custom domains, html, css, js
Nice to have: php, FTP, markdown support<p>Am I missing out on AWS, Github, Digital Ocean, Heroku?<p>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](https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html)

~~~
TheArcane
I don't understand why you need the S3 if you're already hosting it on github
pages.

~~~
K0nserv
Sorry about the confusion. The source[0] is hosted on Github, but the actual
page when compiled to static files is hosted on S3.

0:
[https://github.com/k0nserv/hugotunius.se](https://github.com/k0nserv/hugotunius.se)

~~~
marcamillion
Yeh I think everybody is saying that if you are already hosting the source on
GH, there is no need to host the static files on S3 -- you may as well just
host it on GH:pages, because that will be free and you get all the benefits of
S3.

~~~
TheArcane
Plus, you can use custom URLs on Github pages.

------
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/](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](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://p5js.org/)

[http://twinery.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/its-time-for-the-permanent-web.html)

[https://blog.neocities.org/default-
ssl.html](https://blog.neocities.org/default-ssl.html)

~~~
kyledrake
Thanks for the warm words!

> 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

Haven't announced yet, but these numbers are all increasing soon. Well, except
for the advertising one. I'm literally in the datacenter right now working on
it.

~~~
WhiteOwlLion
Be nice if neocities support Lektor
([https://www.getlektor.com/](https://www.getlektor.com/)), or some sort of
web gui static publishing framework. Something easy like WordPress, but not so
blog focused. I'd do it myself if I had macOS, but haven't got it setup for
Windows yet.

------
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/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/)

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

~~~
pesfandiar
I used to host with them. It's very cheap, but you can't have any expectation
of high uptime.

------
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/](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/161123_0R_8RDY/)

and feel free to check my 3 web sites:

\- [http://www.it-wars.com](http://www.it-wars.com) \- [http://www.louer-
hendaye.com](http://www.louer-hendaye.com) \- [http://www.nodejs-
news.com](http://www.nodejs-news.com)

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

Enjoy!

~~~
larrydag
Can you explain your setup and how you did your self hosted sites?

~~~
rainboiboi
Simply install any linux distro of your choice (mine is Ubuntu) and fire up
apache/nginx to load in your HTML. Then port-forward 80 to your raspberry pi
IP address and you are done. If you are on dynamic IP (which most of the
residential broadband does), set up dynamic DNS and add a CNAME record in your
DNS to point your custom domain to your dynamic domain - this way visitors
will be able to access your site even after your IP changes.

------
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.

~~~
exodust
If I may ask a simple question which reveals my ignorance about AWS and
anything too technical, but what is the actual CMS being used for a website
hosted on Amazon? Take a simple website with text and images that you want to
update via an easy to use CMS, what is the AWS service that is the CMS seen by
a user looking after the website? Does one exist or is it a matter of needing
to make such a CMS?

Edit: thanks for the replies. I had a feeling AWS was more a "parts" bin
rather than anything approaching a ready-to-go hosting + CMS, but thought I'd
check.

~~~
DocG
Amazon offers basically hardware. You rent a piece of server resourses. What
operating system, what CMS you use is up to you, but prepeared to install and
configure everything.

But, they also offer plenty of free (and good) "ready made and pre configured"
packages for people to use (for exampe wordpress, bitbucket etc.). You can
search them here
[https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/)

~~~
throwaway2016a
> Amazon offers basically hardware.

AWS is way more than hardware.

Lambda - on demand code execution

Route53 - DNS and domain registration

S3 - File storage with redundancy and an HTTP interface

RDS - Managed relational databases

DynamoDB - NoSQL key/value store with indexing and scanning

SQS - Job queue-ing without needing to manage servers

SES - Email service with the ability to both send and receive email and also
trigger a Lambda function when email is received

SNS - Fan out notifications with multiple destinations (iOS, Android, Email,
SMS, webhook, etc)

IAM KMS - Manage your encryption keys

EC2 - Ok, this one actually is hardware

Git hosting, docker file hosting. Etc...

That is just off the top of my head. However, if you want to avoid vendor
lock-in, then yes, it is just hardware.

~~~
DocG
You are correct. They are also huge ecommerce site and book store.

I understood previous question as "What CMS amazon is offering for clients in
website hosting", to where I think my answer still stands.

~~~
throwaway2016a
> They are also huge eCommerce site and book store.

That is a complete miss-categorization. Amazon AWS is a single business unit
with EC2 being a single product inside of it. When people say Amazon Web
Services it very clearly means more than just EC2.

To compare EC2 to SQS (simple queuing service) and saying they are different
is the same as comparing Amazon Book sales to Amazon Clothing Sales. It is a
distinction that not many people would make.

Actually in a way it is more like saying that Amazon Selling the Twilight
novels is different than Amazon selling college textbooks.

------
kyledrake
I'm biased, but Neocities ([https://neocities.org](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.

~~~
sogen
You should give a link to custom domains in the front page, took me a while to
find you offer that. Btw are you related to Geocities??

~~~
kyledrake
No relation (except for the site I once had on there). Sadly, Geocities is
long gone. My attempts to acquire the domain name and relaunch the site (at a
bare minimum to restore the old sites to their proper location) have not been
successful.

~~~
sogen
Good idea focusing on that niche. It'd be cool to see geocities live again!

------
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?

~~~
atmosx
I use a static site generated called 'middleman' for my blog. I tested S3
deployment in the past and I must that it's not all that complicated.

The PITA is that you need Cloudfront to handle SSL and if you're not using
Route53 automating the upgrade process is more complex than it should be.

> Can you deploy atomically?

Hm, I'm not sure what _atomically_ means in this context, S3 supports 'sync'
so you basically can write a bash/ruby/python script to handle deployment (I
use a rake task).

> Can you rollback?

Yes, I use git (gitlab) to keep track of changes, so rolling back is not a
problem.

~~~
seanwilson
> I use a static site generated called 'middleman' for my blog. I tested S3
> deployment in the past and I must that it's not all that complicated.

I'm not saying it's super complicated but if extra features are costing you
even a couple of hours of time it's probably worth paying to make the problem
go away.

> Hm, I'm not sure what atomically means in this context, S3 supports 'sync'
> so you basically can write a bash/ruby/python script to handle deployment (I
> use a rake task).

Atomically means you either update all of the files or none of the files. If
you're updating one file at a time there's a chance e.g. a visitor will see a
new page but with the old CSS file. What happens with S3 here? Also, how do
you deal with cache invalidation?

> Yes, I use git (gitlab) to keep track of changes, so rolling back is not a
> problem.

I personally prefer if you can rollback to a previously working deploy with a
dedicated CLI/web rollback option than having to deploy again if that's what
you mean. There's a chance your local setup or deploy script is messed up and
it's quicker.

------
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.

~~~
falcolas
A quick note on the S3/Cloudfront option - make sure you enable "Compress
Objects Automatically"; it's not enabled by default and wasn't provided for a
long time.

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-gzip-compression-
suppor...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-gzip-compression-support-for-
amazon-cloudfront/)

You'll save a lot on your bandwidth bill.

~~~
colinbartlett
You can also set your edge usage to "Use Only US, Canada, and Europe" vs. "Use
All Edge Locations" to save money, depending on your performance needs in
various geographies.

------
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.

~~~
iUsedToCode
Can't find english language switch. Only german then?

~~~
onli
Only german, yes. They explain on
[https://wiki.uberspace.de/philosophy:englisch](https://wiki.uberspace.de/philosophy:englisch)
why (in german): it boils down to too much work, not being sure of being able
to adequately support in english, having servers only in germany and fearing
legal implications of having an english offering.

With google translate and maybe a bit of help from a german speaking friend
(and a bank that supports wiring money to a german account without problems)
that is probably still manageable, but not ideal.

------
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/](https://surge.sh/)

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

[2] [https://gilly.tk](https://gilly.tk)

edit: formatting

~~~
ekiara
netlify looks great, and the free tier covers probably 90% of what all SMEs
need. I'm curious, where are the sites actually hosted?

Does netlify provide the actual hosting or they allow you to setup deployment
to a VPS? Also if netlify does the hosting, how good is their
uptime/availability?

~~~
_fool
I work for Netlify.

We host the sites on our CDN, which has more than a dozen points of presence
around the world. You can either let us build your site using anything you can
get working on linux (see [https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/10/18/how-our-
build-bots-b...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/10/18/how-our-build-bots-
build-sites/) for details) or build it yourself and ship the finished product
to us. Nothing "runs" on our side after build, so there are no servers/VPS's
which you can configure in the equation as far as hosting is concerned. We let
you do a few things that you used to do with htaccess files (redirects are
free; custom headers including basic auth are a paid feature)

You can check out our list of past incidents on our status page to gauge
uptime for yourself: [http://netlifystatus.com/](http://netlifystatus.com/)

Since we use redundant DNS (NS1 + self-hosted), and use dynamic DNS response
based on both location the query comes from cross product which CDN nodes are
responding, we can (and occasionally do) remove, rebuild, or add CDN nodes
without affecting our overall service. Since we use multiple network providers
(for instance we use AWS, but we also use 3 other services), downtime at any
one of our providers won't introduce any substantial problems in our network.

------
reimertz
Github Pages + cloudflare + travis

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

~~~
tapan_k
+1 for Github Pages + Cloudflare

Wish there was a poll option on HN. How are you going to count OP? Will you
share the results?

~~~
lorenzhs
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll](https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll)
\- I've never seen one in the wild, though. Maybe too few people know about
it?

------
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](https://getnikola.com)

~~~
zatkin
I did this for a while and ended up expanding out to setting up my own email
server, calendar server, and contact server. Needless to say, I'm a happy
customer. :-)

~~~
wishinghand
Setting up your own email server? You're a much braver person than I.

------
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.

~~~
bhauer
I wish more geographies had 150 megabit (or even better) symmetric residential
service. I will never understand how residential service became asymmetric by
default. At my address, the best upload speed I can get is ~5 Mbps, which is
utterly embarrassing considering my first DSL connection, in 1999 or
thereabouts, was ~1.5 Mbps symmetric. In 17 years, I have only approximately
tripled my upload speed. (Frankly, even the download speed doesn't seem
commensurate with 17 years of technological advance; such is the tragedy of
popular "good enough" syndrome.)

In my opinion, asymmetric residential service is in large part responsible for
the centralization of the Internet. I would have much liked the alternate
history where residential service continued from 1999 onward supporting and
embracing the notions of self-hosting and peer-to-peer communication. The
resulting decentralized, federated Internet while no utopia in its own right,
would be so much more appealing to my sensibilities.

Putting that wishful thinking aside, your setup sounds nice. Since I can't get
that kind of bandwidth to my house, I had to lease a dedicated server at a
data center.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Thanks.

I'm on Verizon FIOS, and it is symmetrical, roughly. It speed tests about 158
down 162 up. How I got that fast was sorta an accident from moving, and rep
handling it looked at the deals. I think it was maybe $10 more than the 50meg
service I had before.

I see Google Fiber over there, but what I have is nice too, and deployed
wider. I also see Comcast's "gigabit" service with it's paltry 35meg upload.

------
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.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Zero maintenance on WordPress? What do you do? I have several updates all the
time + themes and plugins.

I do like WordPress though

~~~
user5994461
Hosted by wordpress.com of course.

Self hosting wordpress is a nightmare. I wouldn't wish that to my worst enemy.

~~~
patrickdavey
Why do you say "self hosting wordpress is a nightmare" ? I've been doing that
for 12 years and have had no worries at all. Admittedly it's only a very low
trafficked site, but still, curious.

------
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.

~~~
lucasarruda
Of all services mentioned here, this is the one I like the most and the one I
think I'll use.

Their pay as you go makes totally sense when you have a static website that
will be access sporadically and you don't want to rely in a public
infrastructure such as Github.

I also don't want to depend on freemium services, because they could just shut
down the free tier any time.

------
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).

~~~
sciurus
I switched from NearlyFreeSpeech to Amazon's S3 and Cloudfront.

The main reason I left is that I wanted to use HTTPS, but I didn't want to
have to purchase a certificate when there are many good free options available
now. NearlyFreeSpeech requires opening a ticket with customer support to
update certificates, so using Lets Encrypt isn't really an option there.
Amazon offers free certificates for Cloudfront.

In addition to gaining HTTPS support for free, my hosting costs went from a
couple bucks a month to less than 50 cents a month.

~~~
subpar
Not sure when you switched, but NearlyFreeSpeech works fine with Lets Encrypt
and doesn't require opening a ticket with support.
[https://deletethis.net/dave/2016-11/Let%27s+Encrypt+NearlyFr...](https://deletethis.net/dave/2016-11/Let%27s+Encrypt+NearlyFreeSpeech.net+Update)

~~~
sciurus
Nice! Looks like the process was changed after I switched. Still, since they
don't support cron to use Lets Encrypt I'd have to remember to do that every
90 days.

------
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.

~~~
brassic
Seconded. In 18 months my RamNode VPS has had one unexpected reboot, but other
than that it has been flawless.

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

~~~
falcolas
I'm with you on this one. Given the choice between configuring nginx and
navigating AWS/Wordpress' arcane configuration GUIs, I'll go with nginx every
day.

------
tyingq
Gitlab pages ([https://pages.gitlab.io/](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.

~~~
agumonkey
Upvoted for nostalgia.

~~~
Animats
It beats trying to write HTML via Markdown.

~~~
agumonkey
I'm that close to install Win2K and Dreamweaver 4...

------
jdmoreira
I'm very happy with the service at
[https://www.scaleway.com](https://www.scaleway.com)

~~~
gcp
Their pricing looks insane? Like an order of magnitude less than DO, OVH, ...

Edit: Looks like it's because they're using Atom and ARM based servers.

~~~
iUsedToCode
What's that mean for the common folk? Are they slower?

~~~
gcp
Yes. Slow CPUs.

~~~
tyingq
The Atom servers appear to be Avoton Atoms[1], probably a C2550 or similar.
While they aren't as high end as a typical Xeon, they aren't as terrible as
the older Atom cpu. See this chart: [https://www.servethehome.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/Inte...](https://www.servethehome.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/Intel-Atom-C2550-hardinfo-benchmark.jpg)

[1][https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/54859/Avoton](https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/54859/Avoton)

------
iUsedToCode
I use linuxpl.com ([https://linuxpl.com/Hosting-Serwery-
wirtualne](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.

------
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.

~~~
dragonquest
IIRC I think the name is because they allow a lot of content that other hosts
may shy away from.

~~~
kej
It's both: "For everyone to have free speech, they need to be able to afford
it."

------
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/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/)

~~~
bkgunby
I'd appreciate if someone could jump in about the costs of a high traffic
website firebase hosting, as I don't have much experience with other hosting
platforms.

------
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.

~~~
pidg
I knew I had some free space with my Fastmail account but didn't realise how
much - or that I could use my own domains. That's pretty cool.

------
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.

------
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/>](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](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](https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3)

~~~
dfsegoat
Ditto. Can't beat the price + availability and flexibility of S3.

------
chrisanthropic
I've been using Jekyll + Gitlab + S3 + Cloudfront (+ lambda).

This costs me just over 50 cents a month, almost all of which is the
Route53/DNS costs.

    
    
      - Gitlab stores the source and GitlabCI builds the site.
      - Lambda triggers the build on a schedule.
      - GitlabCI pushes the site to S3 (using Gitlab ENV VARS!).
      - CloudFront as the CDN, also provides free SSL.

------
wtracy
I've been a happy customer of Register4Less.com for years, and they throw in
free static hosting with every domain name. It does everything you mention
except PHP and Markdown. (But you could do Markdown yourself with a static
site generator!) They also provide free WHOIS privacy, which is nice.

An extra $1.45/month gets you PHP and CGI hosting, plus raised quotas.

My only caveats: The free hosting tier only gets you 10MB of space per domain
(no bandwidth quotas, though!) Which has been plenty for me for everything
except large photo galleries, but YMMV. Also, I've had terrible experience
with their domain backordering service--the domain I backordered was quietly
released and became publicly available without a peep from R4L.

Their actual domain hosting, website hosting, and technical support has been
stellar, though. (Websites are actually hosted on a shared server somewhere at
OVH, if Ican trust the reverse DNS info.)

------
marttt
If you're into retro-computing and unix, there's also
[http://www.sdf.org](http://www.sdf.org) and
[http://tilde.club](http://tilde.club) (but, as I understand, their membeship
waiting list is endless at this point).

------
dagw
NearlyFreeSpeech.net

super simple, super cheap, never had a real problem.

------
gempir
I prefer full control. I have a 10$ a month Digitalocean VPS with Nginx, PHP
and whatever I want.

------
s_m
You can use App Engine
([https://cloud.google.com/appengine/](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/))
to host a static site for free. It's easier to set up than S3, which I've also
used.

------
ekiara
Github Pages does pretty much everything you've listed. Also Github Pages
explicity allows companies to setup and host their corporate websites on
there.

PROS: It is free, always available, and the deploy is easy once you get the
hang of git.

~~~
Buetol
One big inconvenient is that they don't support HTTPS for custom domains

~~~
reimertz
Which you can solve with cloudflare for free.

------
brianbreslin
For some cheap VPS you can try searching on
[https://lowendbox.com/](https://lowendbox.com/) some are like $2/month
(usually a year commitment)

~~~
JoelTheSuperior
Downside of this is that you then have to administer and secure a VPS.

~~~
brianbreslin
that's true. they list some shared hosting providers though which cost
$1.50/month and they manage the security etc

------
kumaranvpl
How about github.io. Github pages allows us to host our custom domains too

------
reacweb
I am on scaleway bare metal at 3.6€ per month. I use no-ip.com for the free
domain name. I have a docker image to update a jekyll static site that I
publish over ssh with rsync. I use fgallery for the pictures collections. For
me, it is the easiest solution because I am familiar with the OS and it uses
only standard tools that will never change and no fancy and broken website
interface.

It is cheap enough to not bother with the limitations of most low-cost static
site hosting.

------
cyberferret
Another vote for AWS S3 + CloudFront here.

We also have a distributed team updating and looking after our website, and we
use BitBucket as our git repo. Recently implemented their Pipelines feature to
auto update the S3 bucket and refresh CloudFront resources with any changes
pushed to the repo.

Makes it really easy now - just a 'git push' and Bam!, the website is updated
and CloudFront auto invalidates all the old assets and starts serving up the
new stuff. Really smooth.

------
mehdix
Github pages + Jekyll + Wercker for custom builds

Pros: free, convinient (a push ends up as a new post upon a successful build)

Cons: no SSL with custom domain on Github (at least not easily)

~~~
keehun
With Netlify, you get all those things with custom SSL. In fact, you don't
even need your own cert as Netlify interfaces with Let's Encrypt on its own to
provide a custom certificate.

It also lets you interface with Gitlabs (which has its own Github pages
competitor) which provides you with free private repos. I think it's a much
superior setup than Github.

~~~
prh8
Are there instructions about hooking up Netlify with GL pages? I'm currently
using Cloudflare w/ my Github pages blog, but it was a bit tricky to set up
and I'm considering redoing my blog anyways.

~~~
_fool
There are a few:

[https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/08/02/migrate-github-
pages...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/08/02/migrate-github-pages-to-
netlify/) [https://vgmoose.com/blog/moving-from-github-pages-to-
netlify...](https://vgmoose.com/blog/moving-from-github-pages-to-
netlify-2383586894/)

~~~
keehun
It's stupidly easy I wondered why it wasn't any more popular...

------
ig0r0
Recently migrated my Hugo generated blog to Netlify and so far so good.

Deployment from git, Hugo build on server, free HTTPS with Lets Encrypt and
free for my basic usage.

------
libeclipse
I use github to host the source code for my static Jekyll site, but since
github doesn't support HTTPS on custom domains, I use Netlify as a CDN.
Netlify automatically hooks me up with an A+ rated Let's Encrypt cert setup.

So my domain points at Netlify, which pulls the site from github.

The total cost of this setup is only the yearly cost of the domain, which you
can eliminate too if you use a sub-domain on netlify.

~~~
cagmz
Does the free Netlify plan provide a cert?

~~~
gk1
It sets it up through Let's Encrypt with one click.

------
funkaster
I use orgmode publish to html and then a simple script to upload/sync to
s3[1]. Hosted there + cloudflare for CDN/HTTPS. I was hosting the site myself
on a linode, but I like this setup much better.

[1]: [https://www.rolando.cl/201607-1-blogging-like-
its-2016.html](https://www.rolando.cl/201607-1-blogging-like-its-2016.html)

------
imgabe
I have the cheapest VPS from Linode, which is $12.50 a month including an
extra $2.5/mo for their automatic backup service. (So, $10 if you don't want
them to do the backup for you)

I wrote my own little script that converts markdown to html with python and
push that to the server with git, but of course with a VPS you can run pretty
much anything you want.

------
zlib
Long time user of [https://idleserv.net](https://idleserv.net)

------
sergiotapia
surge.sh - i can get a website up in 10 seconds with a normal folder structure
from my machine. i love it.

------
hopeless
middleman -> s3 -> cloudfront. About $0.15/mo.

Pros: Generally works well, speedy enough, free ssl with Cloudfront, cheap for
many sites (most hosts charge per site which catches me out for little
projects). I've mostly got the process figured out now...

Cons: not easy or quick to set up, lots of steps to get right, AWS is a
terrible UI, Cloudfront invalidations are apparently sent by carrier pigeon so
asset hashing is a must, even then it can take a while to see your site
updates

I've noticed a high mortality rate among static hosting sites, particularly
those "just add files to Dropbox and we publish your site" services. Static
hosting services are to ops people what todo list apps are to frontend
designers

Also, to your point: you can't, by definition, run php on a static site.

~~~
cyberferret
> Cons: not easy or quick to set up, lots of steps to get right, AWS is a
> terrible UI, Cloudfront invalidations are apparently sent by carrier pigeon
> so asset hashing is a must, even then it can take a while to see your site
> updates

Check out the s3_website Docker container by attensee. We have it in our
BitBucket pipeline, so that any push to the hosted repo will automatically
copy the latest updates to our S3 bucket AND invalidate the respective assets
quite quickly.

Any website refresh our developer in the US does now is usually available to
look at within a minute here in Australia.

------
lllorddino
I currently have one website that's built with Jekyll and I host it for free
on Github Pages. The only thing I'm paying for is the custom domain name from
Namecheap. Also I set up HTTPS with Cloudflare in front of it.

I prefer this method over managing a server any day.

------
curiousgal
I run a cheap OVH VPS for hosting. I can host any number of websites I want
and it costs less than any static hosting service.

Also, Github Pages and Gitlab Pages are great and free. You can't beat free if
it's reliable and both of those two are reliable.

------
kybernetikos
I host some odd static sites with my fast mail family account. Has webdav file
access and a dns control panel. Since I am buying the email service anyway
it's free :-) Lets you set up different hosts serving from different folders.

------
danielsju6
Firebase ;) Great static hosting, HTTP/2, CDN, custom domains, and free SSL.
[https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting](https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting)

------
babayega2
I've used www.openshift.com to host a django website for free, since 2014!

------
novaleaf
for non-developers, I advocate the use of google sites, which is basically a
google managed wiki. very good for intranet sites, and passable for client
documentation portals.

------
d0m
aws: s3/cloudfront.

------
deedubaya
[https://www.simplybuilt.com](https://www.simplybuilt.com) works pretty well.
Completely free for OSS projects, which is nice.

------
alemhnan
I use surge.sh, pretty easy and comfortable to use.

------
627467
surge.sh + cloudflare

Free static hosting with custom domain support

~~~
hamandcheese
I'm also a big fan of this combo!

------
mihohl
I wouldn't consider WordPress (and most other blog systems) static? But for
real static hosting I preferre AWS S3.

------
jimpick
I like Zeit now, aerobatic.com and surge.sh

------
emson
I have been trying to find the perfect static site hosting solution - although
a little bit engaging AWS offers the best flexibility and cost (if you use the
free tier). Anyway I created a course on how to do it all:
[https://www.udemy.com/go-landing-
pages/?couponCode=BLACK10](https://www.udemy.com/go-landing-
pages/?couponCode=BLACK10)

Anyway good luck.

------
marcamillion
Octopress + Github Pages + CloudFlare = Free, Stable that can handle a good
amount of traffic.

------
logronoide
Hugo + AWS S3 + Cloudflare

------
Thomas_9
OVH just does the job for me since years, cheap and reliable.

------
macandcheese
Middleman + AWS S3 + s3_sync module. Dead simple!

------
espeed
Google Firebase, Google App Engine, GitHub Pages

------
sandGorgon
hugo or jekyll static sites. tons of themes...really cool blogs. no setup. use
github with a custom domain

------
infinityplus1
Dropbox public folder is pretty useful.

~~~
sdpy
Dropbox no longer supports HTML rendering/hosting for their free users.

Dropbox Pro and Business users have a grace period till September 1, 2017.

[https://www.dropbox.com/help/16](https://www.dropbox.com/help/16)

------
tuananh
i use ramnode. my setup is rather simple with git push and git hook to build
along with cloudflare

------
gressquel
AWS S3 with custom domain

------
eswat
GitHub Pages or Firebase.

------
Dowwie
github.io, using it to power the yosai project and my own blog

------
xcoding
Namecheap hosting

------
Bladtman
S3

------
anacleto
AWS S3.

------
cylim
github, we are developer.

------
imaginenore
Look for deals on LowEndBox, there are some amazing ones.

