> Yeah but what about SSL? You’ll need a handful of more lines of nginx, plus a script that runs once a month or so to get a new LetsEncrypt cert. Supposing that script you write or copy/paste works, now you’re good.
The setup might be a bit more involved, but nothing that can’t fit in a single Bash script.
> Until your site gets mentioned on HN or other social media. If you are in fact using a 3 euro/month VPS you’re almost certainly sharing 1-2 CPU cores with some other colocated VPSes. If your site gets a sudden surge in demand (and particularly if you have any images or video on your site) you’re either going to get hugged to death, or worse, people will complain that your site loads slowly and accuse you of writing too much JS.
An HN “hug of death” is a laughably small amount of traffic for a static file web server. Nginx can serve hundreds of static HTML/JS/CSS files per second even on a cheap VPS.
> My recommendation is to use Github/GitLab pages with a free Cloudflare in front for caching and SSL. That’s the setup I use for my site (https://chrisuehlinger.com, but grumps beware: it is absolutely soaked in JS). It’s free/month, doesn’t require moving parts like a manually rolled LetsEncrypt bot, and holds up when my site gets traffic.
I’m sure that setup works well for you, but it’s overkill for serving static files. Unless you’re a truly special case, literally everything you need can be handled in a single VPS, which is dead simple to manage and very easy to move around if needed.
The setup might be a bit more involved, but nothing that can’t fit in a single Bash script.
> Until your site gets mentioned on HN or other social media. If you are in fact using a 3 euro/month VPS you’re almost certainly sharing 1-2 CPU cores with some other colocated VPSes. If your site gets a sudden surge in demand (and particularly if you have any images or video on your site) you’re either going to get hugged to death, or worse, people will complain that your site loads slowly and accuse you of writing too much JS.
An HN “hug of death” is a laughably small amount of traffic for a static file web server. Nginx can serve hundreds of static HTML/JS/CSS files per second even on a cheap VPS.
> My recommendation is to use Github/GitLab pages with a free Cloudflare in front for caching and SSL. That’s the setup I use for my site (https://chrisuehlinger.com, but grumps beware: it is absolutely soaked in JS). It’s free/month, doesn’t require moving parts like a manually rolled LetsEncrypt bot, and holds up when my site gets traffic.
I’m sure that setup works well for you, but it’s overkill for serving static files. Unless you’re a truly special case, literally everything you need can be handled in a single VPS, which is dead simple to manage and very easy to move around if needed.