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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

Ok so we've identified where the friction is - how can we improve on that for the lay person?

How about https://www.netlify.com? Recently had to teach a non-tech person how to host a website from scratch. With all the non-trivial requirements (dns, vps, web server), I thought it would be easiest to just use netlify. That way, a git push on the repo will deploy the site immediately.

"A push on the git repo" is not something I would think trivial for a non-tech person. However, netlify also supports just drag-and-dropping a zip onto the dashboard. That's probably as easy as it gets.

But then you need to create that zip file with the appropriate folder and file structure. I fear that would be too much to ask for then non-technical person that struggles with doing git commit.

You actually don't even have to zip it up. It just needs to be a folder with an index.html file in it. If Microsoft Word exports that, your non–technical person should be fine.

Yep, I had to explain the concept of version control system, using the old my_doc_file.docx, my_doc_file_final.docx, my_doc_file_final_final.docx, ...

I just told him when to use the commands git init, remote, add, commit, and push and what the workflow looks like.

As a couple of people have mentioned, there is a drag and drop feature. How did I miss this!? Anyway it would have saved a couple of minutes of explanation.

You don't need git... they have also a drag-and-drop option - just drag a local directory with your HTML files into the Netlify page and you're done.

I don't know how I missed this. To be fair the "New site from git" button looks bright and green, while the "drag and drop your site folder here" looks dull and grey.

I think a lot of cheap shared web hosts let you upload via browser in a drag-and-drop widget. For example, neocities has a basic drag-and-drop uploader.

A Dropbox-like service that will sync a folder with a web server automatically.

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