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Comment by Sodman | Hacker News Reader

I see the "GitHub Pages" suggested a lot whenever this question comes up, but it's worth noting that it's against their ToS[0] to use it for commercial purposes:

"GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS)."

So it's great if you want to host a personal site / blog or some other non-revenue-generating website, but for anything more than that you could run into issues.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...

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Anyone got issues with this?

In my opinion, there are some cases where it is a gray area: professional portfolio, case studies website with an email collection form, blog posts where you mention that you are a freelancer, a site where you link to your YouTube videos, some simple JavaScript app that don't require a backend but might make some money with ads...

So I'm just wondering how often they strike down at people who operate in this gray area.

I suspect it’s more a “don’t yell at us if your business site is down because you don’t know what you’re doing”.

The SaaS part might have more teeth.

That's a great point. I actually looked at GitHub pages and my main issue with it is there's no way to password lock the site. I don't need serious security here, but I also don't exactly want the entire world to see my HTML playground.

I'm not sure why they're doing it this way, it should be a nominal task to restrict viewers to those with read access to your repo, but I think it underscores the use cases they have in mind here. They want you to use it as a blog and not as a serious web hosting solution.

> it should be a nominal task to restrict viewers to those with read access to your repo

I don't think it would be quite that trivial. They would have to inject authentication into your HTML, which could cause lots of things to break.

They offer it for Github enterprise .

Even for private stuff you're under dictation of a 3rd party that decides what you're allowed to say to whom and who eavesdrops. US was once famous how they valued free speech. Tempi passati.

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