I can kind of see it, but hetzner costs, what, 5€/m for your own server with 10TB traffic included? How is a 4€/m markup remotely justified for what amounts to setting up an apache server and pointing a domain at it? And cutting traffic to a twentieth?
I'm using this for my mother's website (https://www.touchofglass.eu/), and my only complaint is that it assumes you version a website in a Git repository. You can work around it by uploading a tarball or something like that, but it is far less convenient than using sftp/rsync. But considering that we are far into the free 10GB a month and I only have to update it very infrequently, it seemed like the best solution.
"Research has shown that being creative through art projects can help promote stress relief, increase self-esteem, help connect with others, and boost intrinsic motivation. So, participating in mindful art projects can open one's mind to more positive thoughts and offer alternative solutions to life problems."
And wise. Well done publishing the Web site which works without fuss in a calm way.
Why should it be? In my experience it depends on the case, and in my case it seems like an absolute technological overkill to version the site and have statichost regularly pull from some repository, as I update it perhaps once a year.
I mean, versioning is basically free from a technical / storage / time spent standpoint, and my experience says that if you don’t do it you likely will lose your code at some point
Simpler. Or you work/collaborate on projects with people who really shouldn't have to learn Git, even via a GUI.
I'm a programmer by trade and do plenty of versioning via _v1 and so on when working on music with others, we basically send .zip files over Telegram and append some label at the end. Not gonna ask these people to learn something when basic "have many copies" does the trick sufficiently good.
Not really, I just use Emacs' versioned backup files that are automatically generated. As I said, I don't have to update the site that often, so it is entirely sufficient. An advantage for me, besides not having to write Git commit messages, is that I also don't have to version images in Git, which I don't like doing.
Why would i use codefloe and not a more reputable non-profit provider like codeberg/disroot/framagit?
It says it's community owned, but i only see one codefloe team member on the forums and a few people (like you). I didn't find any good community rules or pricing, any political statement about the mission, etc. The only thing i found deep in the comments is that it seems to be for people who don't want FLOSS? Also the pricing mentions mixing a non-profit and a for-profit for the best of both worlds, which as Mozilla has shown is a potentially tragic strategy.
To be clear, i'm in favor of more non-profit hosts. But from reading the site i'm not convinced this one is actually for-profit, what the community stands for, and whether i'm the target audience.
Codeberg does not permit personal repos, it is strictly for open source project communities. Also, it is painfully slow if you are working in a repo of any size. Codefloe is professionally hosted on a robust platform - it could probably support about 10x the volume Codeberg has currently with good performance. I have not used the other options you mentioned but I've long admired what Framasoft is doing.
I'm not sure where you'd get the idea that Codefloe is for people who don't want FOSS. There are hundreds of open source repos. There are also a lot of personal projects, and probably some commercial ones as well.
What they don't want, is an ideology that restricts the types of projects hosted there. Its available for all software projects. Most of their user base are just using the service - and that is really the point. Similar to how most users on Lichess are there to play chess, not to talk about hosting chess servers.
They are owned by a commercial entity, devXY but they are not profit seeking. They need donations to cover costs but are willing to give that time to build up. There are some regular donors[1], but they are not yet covering all costs [2].
They publish a report every quarter where you can see usage figures.
The amount of Codeberg FUD one can encounter on HN is unreal. I'm starting to question whether there's an organized effort behind it.
Both personal and private repos are explicitly permitted in the Codeberg TOS:
> Private repositories[…] allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
As if there wasn't a massive amount of nuance between "you may keep your dotfiles private but don't upload your photo library". If their rules read this arbitrary, I wouldn't trust them to host any of my stuff, especially considering that you always have to hope they don't change their rules any further.
Assume you did some local LLM stuff in June that worked with a 200MB set of various jpegs and you wanted to keep it private: Is this still legit in September 2026? I wouldn't rely on it.
> , I wouldn't trust them to host any of my stuff, especially considering that you always have to hope they don't change their rules any further.
Yeah, I think this is a win-win for both parties.
You strike me as someone who would "ride along the lines of the terms of service" basically, and you'll see anything not explicitly forbidden as being allowed essentially.
While Codeberg is a project driven by humans, with human reactions to what's happening. If you're not comfortable with rules not being 100% defined, and requiring a humans value judgement to be had to figure out if the rule is broken or not, I don't think Codeberg is for you.
The rest of us, who are OK with humans making decisions rather than just going by what's written in rules, are fine with this, because we know our private repositories won't be deleted. And if they are, you'll be able to speak with a human to explain, and if your intention is fine and good, they'll be OK with it. But if you try to argue about some "That wasn't explicitly stated", then yeah, they'll probably get tired of you quickly.
Think your participating in your local user group vs some corporate/government forum, the rules will be enforced differently.
Haven't used Codefloe but at least they're not restricting what projects you can host with them. I don't see any preachy neo-Luddite "don't use AI" or "no private repos pls" messaging on their site.
I've been looking for a new static host recently since Netlify raised prices and is terrible at preventing bot traffic. Here was my assessment of Netlify from the perspective of a small customer who just wants static hosting (and not build minutes).
Pros:
- Run by a single person, so customer service is responsive and comprehensive
- Focused mainly on static hosting without extra complexity
Cons:
- Run by a single person, so increased outage risks
- No support for MFA
- The upload process unconditionally uploads every file rather than an rsync-like sync of only the changed files, which is a pain for my large sites that only change incrementally
- Bot scraper protection is not included (they'll do it for an additional fee)
- Bundles together site builds and hosting, but I only want hosting
So, just as a curiosity, why don't you create a $5/month VPS or something even cheaper, throw nginx/apache/caddy on there, make it fetch from a git repository once a minute or whatever, then call it a day? What does the service need to provide for it to be worth paying so much more for?
This $5/month VPS can effectively handle hosting 100s of static websites for you without breaking a sweat, unless you're doing something seriously wrong.
I think you are picking on the product by sharing a (real) critique of the marketing website.
The product says "100% European static website hosting" it does not make any promise about the actual marketing website they have that will be privacy protected.
So yes, you are right they used in their marketing website maybe some trackers and even so based on the link you shared here they seem to use https://www.simpleanalytics.com/ which sounds okish than any other trackers and it might even be also EU hosted:
"We're a three-person team based in the Netherlands, building privacy-first analytics for the web"
That pixel seems to just gather standard data one might want to optimise the site display. I think display port size or http/s choice is hardly personal data.
Yes such info can be used to track people, but only if you have the database and means to - which a single small provider certainly doesn't. So unless you think this data is being sold for profiling I don't think that their claim is false.
Perhaps I read it wrong, but to me this means "does not collect ... data". In fact, the site uses a third-party service, which obviously sends the IP address.
Finally, the `id` and `unique` string parameters look like something specifically designed to track people.
Significantly too expensive for most users. I understand that they target agencies, but most users would prefer less and pay by site instead of paying 120 EUR / year for unlimited sited
Also the traffic cost is ridiculously high. Even AWS (which is often criticized for their high traffic cost) does not bill traffic below 10 TB (20 times higher) and then cost 0.1 EUR / 10 GB (10 times lower)
I’m a happy OVH user, their free static hosting (part of their paid domain service) is enough for my needs. I’ve been using that platform for more than 10 years now. At the same time I like that there are more alternatives.
My issue with OVH is the support is God awful and half French. Someone made a complaint about my server and their default stance was to nuke me from orbit and ask questions later.
Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
Much happier with Hetzner, even though it's more expensive.
> Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
AFAIK they have a very limited number of DC built reusing shipping containers, most of them, including the ones built in the last ten years, are regular buildings built from scratch or repurposed.
AFAIK there have been ONE instance of a DC taking fire, and it wasn't built from containers.
Only SBG1 was built from containers, it partially burnt due to its proximity to SBG2, but its SBG2, which was not built from containers, that burnt down.
> You can register and use a .eu domain if you are an EU or EEA citizen regardless of where you live, a resident in the European Union or European Economic Area, or a business or organization established within the EU/EEA.
Looks interesting and serves a real need. However, pricing tiers seem a bit steep, especially for folks who don't need the build step to happen on the host.
Also, at least according to the docs, ssh cert based authentication and password based authentication, but no support for public key based authentication?
I'm hosting my static site (https://rz01.org) there and am super happy with the free plan and the support I got from Eric. It's free, it's fast, it's in the EU.
As an american, I'd rather pay than use github's free pages.
I'd go with sourcehut's pages @ €4 per month over statichost if I wanted to specifically go EU. (If not I'd go with nearlyfreespeech for $2ish per month.)
Wow, yeah. I need to start offering static hosting for like $.99 (although then micropayments become an issue...) As is, I host like 100 business' sites on my VPS and only recently surpassed 1% bandwidth.
Bunny.net has a similar model and it's nice (Top up the account and minimum $1 per month).
This website also has a pricing model that is a bit discouraging and quite common in my experience. Nice free tier, thanks, but the first paid tier is a bit far out of reach or not worthy. My only guess is that they are forced to do it this way to fund the free tier.
I just had to go check out your site with that comment. Nicely done! Was waiting for the physics simulation to either fully settle or explode, but really neither of those happened.
However, I am not sure why European mass surveillance and imperialism are supposed to be any better than those of any other country. Somehow that never gets answered on sites like that.
simply put, they aren’t the big bully. they don’t have the worlds strongest army and control of the most important currency to strongarm pretty much anyone who stands in the way.
It seems to be more focused on business static hosting, which Neocities definitely is not. There's at least a dozen business static web hosting solutions out there and we're happy to share space with them.
Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)
I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.
I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.
It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?
> An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth.
statichost.eu is a CDN,[0] not a single static host. Your VPS is the single point of failure, so if that one system goes down, your site is offline.
With a VPS, you'd also have to roll your own atomic updates, which is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's also not trivial.
Compare it to static hosting pricing at Netlify, Firebase Hosting, and Vercel, and it's competitive, but you should expect to pay more for a service run by a small vendor who doesn't have the economies of scale or VC money that the bigger competitors have.
[0] They're an abstraction on top of Bunny, who provides the actual CDN, statichost assumes responsibility for providing the CDN regardless of underlying infrastructure.
Netlify and vercel have a generous free tier, I never paid a dime. What you might eventually pay for in those services is the exceptional DX, which this amateurish service will never get close to.
All this to say that 9€/month is way too expensive.
What's the price that you expect to pay to a service run by a single person that has to keep your website available 24/7?
I get frustrated that people seem pretty aware of the enshittification and centralization of large services, but when an indie vendor pops up that can fill a niche, people expect it to have all the bells and whistles of a billion dollar company and also give everything away for free.
If you have a just for fun website, then yeah, hop around the free tiers of whatever hosting service. If you're running any kind of online business, the difference between free and 9€/month for web hosting is a rounding error to pretty much any other business expenses you have.
Also, keep in mind that on the 9€/month plan, that's the max you pay. With Vercel, Netlify, Firebase, etc., if you get hit with a bot attack, they come after you for $100k+ and you have to beg on social media for them to call off the collectors.[0]
Just yesterday I was configuring my UniFi and being confused on where I can actually find everything in the new UI. I swear the firewall/policy UX changes every version.
its like a retail store where they force you to walk through the chips and chocolates to get to the fruit and veg... just in case you didnt know how yummy chips and chocolates are...
I tried this few weeks ago and there was no authentication on rebuild trigger, so anyone who knows your site url can start build and deploy.
I don't know if things have improved since then.
That’s a shame, because FreeSewing is a fascinating and pretty awesome project! If you know someone in to the textile crafts, you may find this changes their world if they don’t already know of it.
As an european I approve of the claim being "Its not this, its that", because for once its an actual good use of it, as many things claim to be european when in actuality they are american companies, hosting their stuff in an aws/azure european data region, so not really european at all.
Because it looks like they are trying to appeal to people interested in European digital autonomy, but ISRG, the organization behind Let's Encrypt, is based in the US and has to comply with US sanctions.
My static sites are built on the server (Github pages or Cloudflare Pages). They rebuild each time there are new commit on the repo, and that way I don’t need to version built artifacts.
I built locally for many many years and I’m much happier with this model since the commit log is a much better reflection of what changed and there are no inconsistencies as whenever you’d commit source and built artifacts that don’t match.
… It demands some extra care in terms of making sure the server can pull the dependencies and run the build scripts, but that also means my colleagues (or me in the future recovering the project from the repo) would be able to build with what was commited and nothing more… which is a requirement in my case.
There is something special about the combination of people posting something thinking it's some gotcha, then they completely misunderstood both what the thing is, and what they're trying to point out, hilarious.
Greenland is not part of Europe. But they are part of "Rigsfællesskabet" (The Kingdom of Denmark). So part of Denmark but with a high degree of autonomy.
Regarding "European values", I think they are just Western values but with a twist away from the US version. In my layman view, that means: Europe values citizen privacy more, US values citizen freedoms more, Europe values environment more, US values businesses more.
Until recently I would have said Europe values diplomacy more, while US values military power more. But now I dont know about that.
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