Comparing static website hosts (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Comparing static website hosts (2022)

kevquirk.com

93 pointsmobilio44 comments

I must be an oddball because these services never really made sense to me.

I don't want to use their CI. I already have CI for running tests and other validations. I don't want to have a separate single-threaded CI stack with bare minimum features for building the site.

These all have "atomic" deploys which cause problems with hash-named assets as you get 404s during the transition.

What I basically want is something that I can rsync to and that is served by a CDN. I've ended up with S3+CloudFront but it doesn't have all of the nice features you may want from a static site host like index pages, but that is pretty easy to work around.

Same. I don't want to have to reimplement all my CI logic if I change hosting providers. I'm surprised so many vendors assume the opposite.

When I surveyed static hosting providers about a year ago, the only ones I found that didn't insist on taking over your CI pipeline were Netlify[0] and Firebase. I assume it's possible on Cloudflare and AWS, too, but I wanted to go with a provider where static hosting is core to their business.

I've been happy with Netlify, but given how deeply they bury their "manual deploy" feature, I fear the day that they decide to force everyone into the Netlify-native build workflow.

[0] https://docs.netlify.com/cli/get-started/#manual-deploys

might sound crazy but I still love drag and drop a whole Dir into netlify still, its a beautiful method using a computer mouse and it works quite well and takes seconds.

Reminds me of what I used to do 25 years ago with FTP :)

... into Windows Commander :)

...or Double Commander

I used to do that, but recently decided to try out deployment using Netlify CLI—and quickly decided never to drag-and-drop again, if I can help it! Now all I do is `make dev`, and if it looks good, `make netlify-deploy-prod`. Even faster than opening Netlify, going to the site, going to Deploy, and dragging and dropping. But I’m glad that it’s still an option, if I need it.

Yeah, I do sometimes use Netlify because it is so simple to set up. And you can deploy by POSTing them a zip archive which is quite a convenient API.

It largely makes up for their really basic build environment. Last I tried it you can basically pick between Ubuntu versions with some pre-installed software. If you wanted to use an unavailable tool you could either manually download it or you were out of luck.

I've done both on Vercel. Their git repo connections can run basic CI for you on commits to certain branches etc. But you can also just use their CLI as part of your own CI process to deploy to them.

> What I basically want is something that I can rsync to and that is served by a CDN...

Genuine question: and what would you pay (monthly/yearly) for such service? Let's say CDN serves all visitors from EU/NA.

I developed a service for similar purposes last year (I became tired of S3..), but I had some "blockers" with pricing strategies and I'm not a PR person so the product gained very little traction. It's offline now due to my other commitments but I'm keen to look into re-starting it again if there's enough interest.

I've used Vercel for static sites and don't really need a CI in these cases. It's a matter of pushing changes to a git repo and waiting a few seconds to see the changes published. I previously used GitHub pages but found Vercel to be a better experience all around.

If hash named assets are those #! URLs then I say good riddance.

NearlyFreeSpeech.Net is always my goto.

Me too. Nothing beats them for being straightforward and cost-effective.

^ they are excellent. The philosophy, the principles, for which they are entirely unique among all providers. It's also entirely sustainable for many long term personal projects, you really can stick a tenner on your account and potentially forget it for years provided your site isn't stupid size (Although I only recently noticed at some point they stopped charging for per unit bandwidth). They've been around for a long time, and I hope they continue to be around for a lot longer. There is also something soothing about the no BS unchanging interface, not a single stock image in sight :)

I'm slowly moving off of NearlyFreeSpeech, but mostly because I'm going to my own self-hosting from a homelab (with what reliability downsides that will have), and I'm trying to retire my personal cloud bill.

For what it's worth, NFSN is the most excellent website host I've ever used, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone (technically adept) looking to spin up their own lightweight sites.

I wish more services would use the prepay model that NFSN uses. For personal projects and even some minor business uses, I'd much rather have a site go down than be hit with a surprise bill because I misconfigured something.

I like github pages because all I have to do is buy a domain and point it at a git repo and I get HTTPS out of the box.

I don't known why he didn't investigate previous benchmarks for static site hosting. Github Pages was always the best option, by far. Fastest and free.

I’m also a bit surprised at “build times” as I would naïvely expect to build on my laptop and Rsync the result somewhere.

I think he couldn't do GitHub? Down near the end of the article he wrote:

  GitHub Pages was top of the pops in terms of performance, but since doing this research, I learned that they don’t support Jekyll version 4, which is what I run on this site. So if I were to host with GH Pages, I’d need to use GitHub Actions for my build process.

> I think he couldn't do GitHub? Down near the end of the article he wrote:

It's not that he couldn't, it's more of an arbitrary self-imposed limitation.

I fail to understand why he needs to use any code generator on GitHub.

What's wrong with generating all static assets offline and just pushing to GitHub? I've been doing it for years.

Complaining that GitHub doesn't compile your source and generate your site is like complaining that the Play Store or App Store don't allow you to push your source code there, and then they do the build for you.

> It's not that he couldn't, it's more of an arbitrary self-imposed limitation.

Feel free to write your own analysis that _does_ includ GitHub pages, and submit here as well. I'll upvote it.

fwiw, the reason github pages is the fastest is because they're cached by fastly. you can cut out the middle man and put your static site directly on their edgecompute platform now (up to 50MB): https://www.fastly.com/blog/no-origin-static-websites-at-the...

Is this actually practical for a personal blog? I can't find a thing on their pricing page listing an exception to their minimum of $50/month for bandwidth. Blog posts of this size would have to be millions of page views a month to even make the minimum.

Cool! Thanks for the link! This looks like maybe the most appealing option to me.

EDIT: ... from a technical / DX / ergonomics perspective, that is. Pricing? Not so much.

Last time I checked, Fastly charges a minimum of $50 so it's not viable when all the other hosts has a free tier and completely free (github and cloudflare).

I personally use BunnyCDN as a poor man Fastly.

It's pretty good.

In my experience, Amplify as a platform has been a nightmare to work with. It claims fast prototyping and developer convenience but the constant random failed deployments and the flaky CLI drain the momentum you would have with a batteries-included platform. I highly suggest to avoid this platform.

This was interesting to read. I recently changed from Drupal to WordPress and now I'm thinking something more static would be better. Good to know all my options.

You can use Wordpress as a static site generator with some plugins. Basically run Wordpress on a local copy and flatten it out to static files for upload.

This is interesting. Can you link to tools that do this “flattening”?

Can one use wget -m for this? Or is there more to it?

Simply static is the one I've used, but wget can work, it's not optimized and may break in some edge cases.

Not OP but used SimplyStatic[0] to export flattened pages and assets. It’s still its own deploy process but you avoid a lot of security and site speed issues. You can specify root domain and allow/deny which URLs get exported.

[0] https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

The activation process uses freemius, which is a joke. I've been trying to activate for 2 weeks and still haven't been able to get it working, and their support is a joke. No shade on the plugin itself, just the third party licensing provider. The free Simply Static has worked great.

I just have an ec2 i shove stuff onto with a swag container proxy, works well enough tho it doesnt have the bells and whistles other static hosts do

surge.sh continues to work well for me. Dead simple, free or cheap, have used it for many projects.

Second this. The simplicity of getting a site up and running with surge.sh is just unmatched.

Azure blob storage works as a static website host too, probably at literally any scale.

a box in your closet or bare metal in the datacenter, repectively?

While you read the TOS end-to-end (you do that, right?), I finish the site and have lunch.

If that works for you, then great. But others do have different requirements to you, and thus it's useful to see someone compare different solutions.

And when you are doing maintenance on your closet, I will confirm my site is still running fine and eat my lunch.

what maintenance do you think of that brings downtime? Right, openssl, systemd, udev & the like. There are some, but really less than the TOS.

What bothers me, isn't that this isn't for anyone. But that it's missing in comparisons. That's pretending doing overviews but wearing blinders. Deplorable.

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