This is more of a thought experiment, I know a multitude of ways to do this which require loads of setup, jumping through AWS hoops, etc. I'd like ideally way to deploy to a hosted service with a single command. Imagine Heroku but even easier.
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Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying. It's fairly clear (for obvious reasons) that they mainly think about Jekyll users, though I had a Hugo blog there for a while.
Netlify sounds great, but in practice I ran into an annoying issue that I couldn't resolve where I had to rerun every automatic build. This probably isn't really their fault but the forums didn't work.
Cloudflare Pages kind of just worked out of the box, and since I was already using it for my DNS, changing where the domain pointed took a few seconds.
I'd suspect, if you corrected for how many issues were particular to me, I'd say Cloudflare Pages ~ Netlify > Github Pages. I'm kind of surprised the latter charges you for custom domains; I do have to say there's more documentation for Github than any of the others.
GitHub Pages is static hosting. If you don’t need Jekyll, don’t use it. There’s nothing special about it.
GitHub Pages does NOT charge for custom domains.
You can configure any branch for GitHub Pages, or even just the /docs folder on the main branch.
This is in the docs: "GitHub Pages will use Jekyll to build your site by default. If you want to use a static site generator other than Jekyll, disable the Jekyll build process by creating an empty file called .nojekyll in the root of your publishing source, then follow your static site generator's instructions to build your site locally." (https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...). Netlify and CF will both run some other static site generators (e.g. Hugo in my case) for you, while Github Pages will run Jekyll (or you can build locally).
And yes, custom domains are free for public repos. I made a mistake reading the page about custom domains, which mentioned that private repos need a Github Pro account. You're also right about configuring any branch.
The default setup for GH Pages is not great. Jekyll is very dated. But if you use GH Actions, you can build yourself a pretty great setup. My site is open source at https://github.com/jacobp100/jacob-does-code - there's also a blog post about how the build system works.
As someone who does a lot of browsing with unpopular web browsers, Cloudflare is basically a way to ensure that it is a coin toss as to whether or not I will see your site; it is not the worst CDN/DoS protection racket service out there though. I would like to see how much legitimate traffic Cloudflare or the others block, and how much website operators are spending on that "service."
Third party free hosting excels at the ability to do a start to finish page in inside an hour. I want to spend 55 minutes of that hour writing the text, not fiddling with oddities of how to make GitHub actions show me the parse errors of my markdown...
That is not the case with netlify.com which boasts a myriad of features, is equally as fast, production-ready, and competitively priced.
With pages.dev, I believe, you pay per every domain you host, whilst with netlify.com, there's no cap on number of domains per account, though they do charge for bandwidth (unlike pages.dev).
Workers Sites [1] is a viable alternative and I quite prefer it over pages.dev.
[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites
nope, we do unlimited sites on pages! here's the free plan [1]:
> 1 build at a time
> 500 builds per month
> Unlimited sites
> Unlimited requests
> Unlimited bandwidth
you can upgrade to the pro ($20/mo) or business ($200/mo) plans for more concurrent builds and builds per month. still not priced per domain or site!
[1]: https://pages.cloudflare.com/#pricing
* Three reasons. 1) The identity widget has people setting it up in such a way that tokens aren't refreshed and logins last only an hour. https://github.com/netlify/netlify-identity-widget/issues/11... 2) Netlify Identity keeps bumping me out despite having gone out of my way to get it configured properly. I don't know why but the issue has lasted for weeks. 3) In development mode, the token can't be verified without making a request to Netlify Functions, and the suggested path (in Redwood.js at least) is to just parse the JWT without verifying it.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/migrations/migrating...
What do you mean by that? I've been (and still am) hosting quite a few pages with their service using custom domains and have never been charged for that.
Saying that because I tried it out again a few weeks ago for a friend's website (https://neasair.org), and nope... it doesn't provide AAAA DNS records (IPv6), just A (IPv4).
So, had to put the website on some other infrastructure already hanging around, that does do AAAA records.
Gitlab pages has an option to look at the /build folder for web pages to serve up. So as long as that folder is in the .gitignore, my Gitlab ci just runs `hugo` to build the site which then gets served up.
"With GitLab Pages, you can publish static websites directly from a repository in GitLab. Use for any personal or business website."
That is Netlify and Cloudflare Pages' defining feature, and GitHub has had that for a few years now.
You can configure github projects to source from a different branch (including your main/master branch if you check in build artifacts directly)
Granted, my blog is an insignifcant site with a tiny readership and I rarely update it, so if you need something more heavy duty than I have no idea if GH pages is up to the task.
You don't need that anymore. You can run Github Pages out of a branch like /docs, which makes life much simpler. That's how I run most of my sites.
- I've got several sites on gh-pages with custom domains and pay exactly $0
- I don't use Jekyll, I literally just `git push` a static repo
For everything else it expects your SPA to handle it.
We nerds often seem to fall into the trap of over-engineering things, like, spending a lot of time building personal stuff that can scale into the infinity – only to end up never having more than 10 concurrent visitors at any given time.
By accepting and embracing the intermittent and slightly unstable nature of serving websites from our homes, we can take back much of the in(ter)dependence and hacky, quirky fun that many of us fondly remember from the 90's and 2000's.
Setting up a webserver on a Pi and serving it from home can be a fun project, not necessarily trivial for everyone, but definitely within reach for most technically inclined people.
Might be among the cheapest, easiest AND fun ways to host a static site :)
Bonus that this works even if your server is behind some DMZ or bastion without having to open up the mothership.
(For the use-case of a public personal static site this probably doesn't make much sense; you could just publish to the VPS in the first place. But if you have server-side stuff you must or want to run locally for whatever reason, this is way more straightforward to get right than manually fiddling with iptables, using some SSH tunnel, or setting up redundant reverse proxies)
https://xkcd.com/908/
Put the free Cloudflare proxy in front just to speed it up a little.
If I switched to a different ISP, I used to be able to get a fixed IP for a one-time $40 fee. I think that offer is no longer available though.
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Do you take precautions or just accept the theoretically lower reliability of the phone – which isn't anything reliable anymore anyway, thanks to VoIP?
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Me and a friend mentor for Code Louisville, and we're able to get the beginner frontend students up and running very quickly using these options - they're free and much easier to use.
"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/...
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'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.
Damn, I have never been so wrong:
And so much more.One of their neat features is the ability to spin up "pull request sites" automatically, so you can share versions of your site with stakeholders before it's made live.
Disclaimer: I work at Vercel, happy to answer any questions.
[1]: http://vercel.com/
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Disclaimer: I don't work at Vercel and I'm just a regular guy
[1] - https://neocities.org/
Use it to host my blog; free tier is good, but I really like them and have really phenomenal limits, etc, so just pay (even though my blog is not updated nearly as much as I'd like)
Example site: https://jeremyshaw.co.nz
Other than that I'm sure Github Pages and Netlify are fine, both very popular options.
Worst case you put it on Amazon S3 and get charged a fraction of a dollar every month .
The fact that you cannot put a cap on your spending is infuriating (the official AWS answer is "we do not want to break your business" (even if I want to)).
To be fair, some complaining or crying in such cases usually gets your bill reversed.
I've had spikes of up to 300k visitors to my Firebase blog in a month, and the bill was like $150. It seems hard to get bitten by huge surprise costs from a blog on Firebase static hosting, even if someone's using a botnet to try to drive up your bill.
Edit: Thinking about it a little more, I guess you could find the largest resource on a blog and direct your botnet to download it nonstop repeatedly, and that would be orders of magnitude more expensive than even large organic traffic.
You can set up billing alarms and use alarms as triggers for actions.
I miss the old days :(
I host my personal site this way.
I also host about 100 mostly-static mostly-low-use websites at work similarly: with Apache on a couple of VMs. They are more reliable than the free versions of Netlify etc, and the systems work to maintain 100 static websites is little different to maintaining 5 static websites.
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It will also be stupid fast (cloudfront is edge networks) + have ssl + it will not go down if you ever see a surge in traffic.
I have several of these and they work beautifully. As far as cost goes: 12$/domain per year + 0.5$/month for route53 zone + 0.2$/month for the actual traffic and hosting the content in S3. So it's under 2$/month for "enterprise grade"
Except that it isn't.
Only the domain, and to some extend, the S3 costs are the "fixed" cost that you can even predict at first. A surge in traffic will surely increase the egress data, and that is easily $0.05-0.10 per GB.
Cloudfront is one of the most expensive CDNs out there, and after 2-3 years of use, I came to realize how much I was wasting money on. CDNs often work quite flawlessly if you have a good cache busting mechanism, and I was paying a huge premium for what was essentially a set-once operation.
at 10GB per month you pay 0.8$/month yes the traffic it costs extra, but a static website should not be GB (or even MB) in size. Also, if you have a lot of traffic you should learn how to control the caching aspect.
i would also challenge you to look at what egress traffic costs in other places.