

Forge - Static hosting made simple - elliottkember
https://getforge.com/

======
masnick
It seems to me like the set of people who (a) can make a static HTML site and
(b) can't figure out to use Amazon S3 or GitHub Pages or a traditional host
like [http://nearlyfreespeech.net](http://nearlyfreespeech.net) is quite
small. But it seems like this is the set of people static hosting services are
targeting, or am I missing something?

It's worth noting that you can get more or less the same functionality hosting
a static site on Amazon S3 with a free CloudFlare account for CDN +
JavaScript/CSS minification. Unless your site has tens of thousands of
visitors a month, S3 will be essentially free -- it would take a LOT of
traffic to cost more than $10/month.

Uploading the site to S3 is marginally more difficult than uploading to Forge,
but if you can write HTML you can probably use one of the many GUI S3 upload
tools.

I'm not trying to be a jerk about this -- I'm genuinely curious who the target
customer is and how Forge (and similar sites) differentiate themselves from
existing services. What problem is Forge solving?

(One way Forge is definitely different is great UI design. Props to whoever
did their design work!)

~~~
elliottkember
Hey there! I'm Forge's lead developer. We're targeting people who want to set
up a site, but don't want to set up a server or use Amazon's admin panels.

For example, many front-end developers and designers struggle with things like
S3 buckets, setting up cloudfront, minifying assets and images, and keeping a
version history.

If you're a developer like me or you, Forge is useful because it's one less
tool that you have to mess with to host your site. Simple, easy, everything in
one place. I hate using the S3 admin panel and wanted to build something I'd
enjoy using.

~~~
masnick
Thanks for your reply!

I definitely agree that all things AWS are terrible in terms of learning curve
and usability. It's easy to forget how unintuitive setting up static hosting
on S3 is (bucket policies, ugh).

So I guess your real competition is either (a) GitHub as that becomes more
accessible to non-developers or (b) traditional FTP-accessible web servers.
There's definitely room for improvement in both.

Best of luck to you with your launch.

(One of your competitors has a really neat feature that magically makes static
web forms work -- [https://www.bitballoon.com/](https://www.bitballoon.com/).
This seems like a great feature that really sets a hosting service apart from
a FTP-accessible web server. Making a contact form is non-trivial, much more
so than using FTP IMO.)

~~~
elliottkember
> It's easy to forget how unintuitive setting up static hosting on S3 is
> (bucket policies, ugh).

Yeah, exactly. There are a lot of services available for this, but precious
few really nice ones.

> So I guess your real competition is either (a) GitHub as that becomes more
> accessible to non-developers or (b) traditional FTP-accessible web servers.
> There's definitely room for improvement in both.

It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's appeal
to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an app like
Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into the Terminal
and type Git commands.

> (One of your competitors has a really neat feature that magically makes
> static web forms work --
> [https://www.bitballoon.com/](https://www.bitballoon.com/). This seems like
> a great feature that really sets a hosting service apart from a FTP-
> accessible web server. Making a contact form is non-trivial, much more so
> than using FTP IMO.)

Yes, I've just checked it out. Definitely a useful feature and something we've
often considered. Good to have some competition, I guess.

~~~
masnick
> It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's
> appeal to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an
> app like Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into
> the Terminal and type Git commands.

I think GitHub is moving in that direction. We're not talking about the
general public here -- we're talking about people who can write HTML. There's
not a big stretch from that to working on a static site via the GitHub website
(you can create/edit/delete files online now).

For a single-person project, the GitHub for Mac app is probably easy enough
for at least some non-devs to figure out. I've got some of my non-dev friends
to use it for sharing statistical analysis code. It's not perfect but it's
doable.

With that said, I definitely see where you're coming from now.

------
elliottkember
Sorry everybody! We hit our Heroku database limit unexpectedly. We're hesitant
to upgrade while our initial launch traffic hits so are maintaining the site
manually. Sites hosted on Forge are elsewhere and performing just fine.

~~~
Kudos
I'm torn between upvoting this for visibility and downvoting it for being
dumb.

~~~
elliottkember
You can go ahead and downvote it since it's all fixed now. Worse yet, the
migration ended up only taking two minutes, so downvote this one while you're
at it.

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eCa
I think the copy could be improved.

The service is obviously not targeted to developers, but several words is:

    
    
        > zip-and-deploy with Forge
    

What's zip? What's deploy?

    
    
        > Uploading and deploying static builds is the way it should be.
    

What's a build? (Yes, there sort of is an explanation underneath, but how do I
create a build?)

My suggestion would be to make it less technically sounding.

~~~
twanlass
Agreed, though as others have noted, if you're capable enough to build the
static site in the first place you probably get the zip & deploy stuff.

Forge is probably better off selling this to designers or agencies and giving
them some multi-site controls.

------
bobfunk
Too bad their site is down, curious to see it since we just launched
BitBalloon [https://www.bitballoon.com](https://www.bitballoon.com)

Always interesting to see similar services popping up. Too bad about the
downtime...

------
OWaz
I'm confused by this statement "Your Forge account is billed based on how much
bandwidth you use. On our basic plan, if you stay under 10GB each month,
you'll only be charged the base rate of $10."

Is it that I only pay for what I use or is it a minimum $10/month charge?
Right now with
[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/) (and
similar to AWS) I really only pay for what I use. With NFS I deposit money and
based on my usage each month money is deducted. Please make it clear if I'm
billed on usage or charged a flat rate.

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kylec
$10/month for 10GB seems really expensive. For example, $5/month for a Digital
Ocean VPS includes 1TB transfer. Now, maybe Forge is much faster or more
robust, but is it really worth 200x as much per GB?

~~~
elliottkember
That's 10GB of CDN bandwidth, which is much faster, and geographically
distributed.

~~~
resu
It still doesn't make any sense. You can get the same drag and drop deployment
with graphical ftp software and 1-click static site deployment. At 1/100th of
the cost.

------
danaw
I'm not having an errors accessing the site, however I'm a bit turned off by
pricing. $10/m seems steep to me for just hosting static files. I especially
don't like that I can't do a git push to deploy updates (breaks my workflow)
and having to zip files seems unnecessary. I also don't see any must have
features; hosting on a CDN isn't a killer feature and the zip deploy, at least
for me, makes it a no go.

~~~
elliottkember
That's fine - Forge isn't for everybody. Our target market is front-end
developers and designers, or anybody who wants a new, simple workflow. Thanks
for checking it out!

------
husky
Sure - developers can access services that are cheaper than this. Outside of
HN developers are a minority though and tools like Dropbox took a tech that
was available to techies and brought it to the masses.

Some pointless comments here kicking a person while they are (or their server
is) down - I'll never understand that mentality

Congratulations on the launch

~~~
elliottkember
Thanks! We really appreciate your comment.

------
lubos
The site is either showing error message, loading really really slow or
finally fast as advertised.

Very inconsistent performance. Staying with Amazon CloudFront for static
hosting.

One question though, is SSL supported for custom domains? that's the only
thing I would be willing to switch from CloudFront for.

------
diggan
Not a very good first impression.

>"This doesn't happen often, but it looks like something is broke." Well, your
initial page is broken.

>"Hitting the back button and trying again might be your best bet." Nope,
didn't work.

>"If that doesn't work you can head back to the homepage. " That's the page
I'm trying to go to!

>"There might be more information on our status page which is reporting All
Systems Operational." Yeaah.. No, all systems aren't operational.

~~~
elliottkember
Sorry about that - it's up and down at the moment. We only just launched and
quickly hit our DB limit. We're waiting to upgrade the database until after
the initial traffic wears off as it involves taking the site down completely.
Rock and a hard place!

------
neilmiddleton
How's this different/better than S3?

------
afandian
I've got two different error messages. The status page has no idea there's
anything wrong.

------
bnycum
Any more info on TurboJS? Is it open source or proprietary? I'm guessing
proprietary to set you guys apart. Site is pretty fast and slick. I enjoy both
Hammer and Anvil. Plan on building support into the apps for Forge?

------
yesimahuman
Static hosting seems the rage today. The biggest question is whether value can
really be added on top of just hosting static assets. I think you can, but
it's not going to be easy. Best of luck.

~~~
rch
How about SSL?

------
true_religion
I think the cross section of people who want simple hosting, but don't care at
all about bandwidth is small.

most of the features provided are only useful to developers as well.

------
samsnelling
Any way I can see some example sites already hosted with Forge? I've been
considering using S3+Cloudfront, and this looks like a cleaner solution!

~~~
elliottkember
Sure thing! [http://hammerformac.com/](http://hammerformac.com/),
[http://anvilformac.com](http://anvilformac.com) and
[http://riothq.com/](http://riothq.com/) are all hosted on Forge.

------
wildtype
"Application Error"

i didn't know if a static site is an application..

------
subpixel
Are there advantages over `git push -u origin gh-pages` that I'm missing?

~~~
dkuntz2
You don't have to use git?

~~~
subpixel
I feel like I do, personally, but more power to you if others feel otherwise.

~~~
dkuntz2
You misunderstand me, I like git, but there are lots of people who don't like
it, and would much rather be able to do everything with their mouse.

~~~
subpixel
I get you. But while we're all complaining about this let me point out that I
use and love Anvil. Thanks!

~~~
elliottkember
Haha - I was reading through this whole thread and didn't expect that. Glad
you like it.

------
Nikkau
Free plan without custom domain is useless, no point to test your service.

~~~
neilmiddleton
I think they would prefer you pay

------
tuananh
I'm quite satisfied with Github pages and jekyll.

~~~
dkuntz2
Maybe other people aren't. Maybe they want a more graphical interface.

And, I have no idea, but can you use Github Pages with a private repo? Again,
I don't know, but if you can't, this doesn't publish the source publicly.

~~~
nikolaplejic
Isn't your source already public if all you do is host static pages?

~~~
dkuntz2
Maybe. But you can't make directories that you don't talk about on a public
repo, because anyone could go and look at those.

