Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
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.
I've tried Github pages, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages. Moved last night to the latter.
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.
Hosting a personal blog on old / cheap hardware at home and accepting some downtime now and then should be a trade-of worth making for most. An interconnected web of documents served from personal computers residing under a desk or in a basement – it is a beautiful thing.
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 :)
GitHub Pages or Netlify for sure. With either of these options, your static site can be set up to deploy whenever there's new commits to the specified branch.
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.
Check out Vercel! [1] You can deploy for free, with a single command, in a few minutes.
Disclaimer: I work at Vercel, happy to answer any questions.
[1]: http://vercel.com/
If you mean pure html/css, then the least friction would be NeoCities [1] It is free and not owned by Microsoft or Google.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
I personally use Firebase for all my static sites. Completely free and fast. If you need to run some backend function they have Firebase functions which is free to a certain degree too.
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 .
Check with your ISP, they often offer some 10 or sometimes 50! MB of free space to host your homepage and images under an account url, eg: http://example.com/~you. Uploading is easy, just FTP your files to their server and your done!
I miss the old days :(
AWS S3 + Cloudfront.
The initial setup can be a little finicky, but once you do get it setup, the rest of the time you only do an S3 sync from your local dir to the S3 bucket.
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"
Azure Static Web Apps is free at the minute, and I've heard the pricing will be very reasonable once it comes out of preview (in the cents/pennies probably unless you're really popular!)
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/app-service/stati...
Would recommend giving it a bash, or you could deploy it manually with Azure Blob Storage Websites and a simple deployment CI pipeline.
I continue to be a big fan of surge [1]. A number of toy projects/demos of mine have been developed using create-react-app, rendered to static files, then deployed via surge.
[1] = https://surge.sh/
Netlify! I use it for holding pages for client websites. Quick upload of a folder containing an index.html and a stylesheet and off you go.
Seconding the https://nearlyfreespeech.net suggestion. I used to be their customer and had absolutely no complaints.
I have switched to BunnyCDN [1] a while back, also very happy with it. Pricing is extremely cheap, and has the added benefit of being able to cache anything dynamic you might add in the future.
[1]: https://bunny.net/
I have my site in an S3 bucket with the static-site flag activated. It would not win for 'easiest'. However, it's the only thing in my personal AWS account right now and my monthly bill is $0.83
The most popular currently is probably https://www.netlify.com/ - 100% free.
If AWS + CloudFront is too difficult and you don't mind spending a few bucks, it's pretty easy to get started with LightSail - about $3.50 a month.
NearlyFreeSpeech is an incredible service. It has honed its focus on simplicity even as virtually every one of its competitors have attempted to commodity complexity.
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy complex services as well. But for simple web hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech is the best I've found, and whatever is second isn't close.
GitHub Pages are probably the easiest to work with, with node modules built for easy one-command publishing.
Though for production I'd probably use S3+Cloudfront.
Github pages - free
Basic FTP hosting starts from $10 per YEAR so it can be considered cheap as well - just create an subaccount that after login will be in the your page destination so it will be blazing fast to use with w.g. FTPzilla and just drag and drop your files each time you want to update.
If you use Fastmail, it comes with static website hosting included
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder
GitHub pages! It’s free so I don’t think it can get any cheaper.
My weekend project is to move a small personal site to Cloudflare Pages[0]. Can't vouch for it yet, but it might be worth a look.
[0] https://pages.cloudflare.com/
Google App Engine has a very generous free quota. The setup isn't as easy as good old FTP, because you need to define your static files in a configuration file. Once the config is written the deployment is a single command though.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine
A while back I wrote a tool* to make this as easy as possible for my use case: a single command to register the domain, jump through all the AWS hoops, and have a live static site with ssl at the end. I was pretty happy with it.
These days, though, I just use netlify. It's not quite one command, but it's about heroku-level easy, and it gives you a lot of little niceties (autodeploy whenever you push a specific git branch to github, ssl, etc).
* https://github.com/kkuchta/scarr
I use
git push
and that deploys my static site, which I think counts as "Heroku but even easier".
For this to work, in the bare repo I push to, over ssh, the post-update hook automatically pulls into a non-bare repo:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
echo -n 'updating... '
git update-server-info
echo 'done. going to foo'
cd /home/bar/public_html/absolute/path/of/a/non/bare/clone
echo -n 'pulling... '
env -u GIT_DIR git pull
echo -n 'updating... '
env -u GIT_DIR git update-server-info
echo 'done.'
You can use rsync too, but I think Git is substantially better for this kind of thing.
Now of course this assumes that you already have a server machine somewhere, which you can ssh into, which is running a web server, and which is already in DNS. I've been in that situation for 26 years now, except that at first I used telnet. So I kind of take it for granted.
It sounds like maybe you're looking for a way to not run your own web server process, instead sharing the burden with other people, like a PHP shared host from 15 years ago. If that's what you want, maybe you should share the server with a few friends? Like, two to eight? That way you don't have to give up the ability to solve whatever problems come up with the server.
For the extra $1-2/mo, I think a $5 DigitalOcean ubuntu/similar droplet provides a ton of value, above and beyond just hosting a "static" site at the cheapest place for less. Want email too? ez. Virtual Hosts? ez. SOCKs proxy in the cloud? literally built in.
I'd say Digital Ocean's newish Apps platform. Static sites are free and they can run a build step for you (still free).
Depends on what you may already have! I was looking for something similar the other day, and remembered that I already had some redirects setup under my custom Fastmail domain; turns out they also allow you to host static HTML. You can even generate a dedicated FTP login to automate uploading. This specific case might not apply to you, but perhaps you’re already paying for another service that also offers something like this?
I user https://render.com for my dynamic ($7/month) and static (free) sites.
You specify a build command (ex. `npm run build`), and a directory (ex. `_site/`) and it will build and host it for you. It can automatically deploy on git events, or via web hook, or manually (button push). SSL/custom domains are also free and very easy to setup.
I stan render.
I did something similar for a kids coding camp in Bulgaria. It requires 0 technical knowledge, no registration and no captchas, but it is maybe a bit too tailored for their use case: https://bin.gamejs.online
I actually started it using myself, because it is so nice to just zip a folder and get it online in ~10 seconds.
I use pinata to pin an ipfs hash and then a public gateway (currently using cloudflare). It's free and a fun programming assignment to script the pinata and DNS APIs so that I can update my site.
I created https://tiiny.host - might be exactly what you're looking for. Command line tool coming soon!
Take a look at sourcehut pages (srht.site) too.
surge.sh is quite nice, mainly because you just run the command from your “dist” directory, press enter a couple of times, and it’s uploaded.
If you want a more CI type service (i.e. you push your code and it builds on the cloud, rather than you build it locally - or it requires no build), I’ve found Netlify pretty good.
Was using Vercel for a Next.js project recently, quite nice experience but it randomly started timing out about 50% of builds and their support were unwilling to help without a minimal repro - fair enough, but I was on a deadline so switched to Netlify, which built the site with no issues.
Will try out Cloudflare Pages next based on the positive comments in here!
I guess cheap and easy are opposite directions in a way, but if you are totally static, I guess a Digital-Ocean instance isn't too difficult, with some leeway to improve the response-time over time; Just slap a Nginx or something on it, serve up the statics, and maybe establish a way to upload stuff (scp?), Just keep hold of backups (docker images, configs/dotfiles, and actual content), put good protection on the droplets (they are targets for hacking).
The benefit is that it's just a linux distro of your choice, so you can use whatever you are familiar with, and there is scope to add non-static service if needs be.
If all you really need is static web hosting there's several "good enough" or even "really good" free options these days, and many of them have insane reliability/uptime and can even build your site/blog for you. Many of them can be set up to deploy automatically when you commit to a repo.
- GitHub Pages and Netlify are the two obvious and most popular choices, but there's also cloudflare, gitlab pages, hell even Keybase has static website hosting: https://book.keybase.io/sites
Please don't upvote or downvote this one. It's more like a "debugging" comment.
Hetzner Cloud gives you a full VM for 3 USD/month. I have hosted a game there with thousands of daily users.
I'm using an AwardSpace [0] because they offer free hosting with PHP/MySQL and other features for free. Best is that they are over 15 years on market.
For alternatives there is Firebase Hosting [1] that is also great since it's running on Google infrastructure.
[0] https://www.awardspace.com
[1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting
Cloudflare pages. The only real limit on the free plan is "500 builds / month". Simple is relative, of course, but if you're a developer, you'll likely find it simple, and it does fit your "deploy with a single command" requirement. https://pages.cloudflare.com/
You can also tie it with the free plan for Cloudflare Workers if you have some need beyond static pages.
In case someone finds it helpful, I created a terraform script to create all AWS resources to self-host a static site via S3 and Cloudfront: https://gist.github.com/benkoller/360019b4ad40d572bccc2875b4...
I've been using this for years at over a dozen different projects, I think it's a great way to host even commercial sites.
I use site44.
It's ridiculously easy. It's a front-end to Dropbox, so if you're already doing this, it's basically:
Sign up, chose "mycrapsite.site44.com"
cp -pr deployedsite/* ~/Dropbox/Apps/mycrapsite.site44.com
Now your site is on the web.
Nothing else is as easy as that. Super convenient for a lot of times when you just need a few files accessible via the web for some reason, too - no need to use any web interfaces, just copy on the command line, and done.
Cloudflare Pages, or Firebase Hosting. Both can be spiced up with cloud functions.
In the past I compared downtime between github pages, firebase and gitlab using pingdome. Firebase had the most downtime, then github. Gitlab had zero downtime for months. Not sure it's the simplest but it was simple enough. Included Let's encrypt TLS out of the box and free support of custom domain name. Plus I configured auto deploy after each master commit with gitlab ci.
Regarding some cost free solutions mentioned here: how does the saying 'if it is free, then you are the product' hold up?
For free, anywhere? GitHub, GitLab, Vercel, AWS S3... Even you watch can serve a decent amount of static pages/sec nowadays.
I built my site with Vuepress, and it auto-deploys to Netlify once merged to master. PRs also have preview builds, and their builds are fast. Very easy setup, and free.
Details here:
https://fotijr.com/blog/2020/how-its-made/
Speaking of AWS, I recently deployed a gatsby web site with AWS Amplify. It links to your git repo and will automatically deploy when you merge to master/main. You can also deploy branches you want to test out. As this was my second website I have ever deployed, I was amazed at how easy it was to setup.
If you don’t mind the code being public, GitHub pages is free and a fantastic resource. I think you can also upgrade to a paid version to make the code private. Check it out here: https://pages.github.com/
Over the years, I've tried it all. Currently hosting my blog (nywkap.com) on AWS S3. It's cheap and fast but the overhead is still annoying. I don't find it interesting or technically challenging to go through the bumps of re-generating/re-deploying/cleaning CDN caches, etc. Also, publishing from a smartphone is either too hard or even impossible.
[self-promotion]
After some frustration, I actually started working on a blogging platform that combines the speed of static site generators with the comfort of hosted solutions, all while making sure you own the data in a sane format. And also a personal preference - it must be as green as possible.
Check it out: https://zeroms.blog/
I should have the MVP ready next month.
I use docsify with github pages. This allows you to edit in markdown.
Github basically gives you a free IDE. There's no need to compile as markdown is converted to html on the client side.
https://docsify.js.org/#/
When I did this I used netlify.
However for my use case I now use cheap shared hosting and Wordpress, because the sheer amount of plugins to solve all kinds of problems is amazing.
One of the built in themes I think 2019 is a nice starter for a modern site and with Gutenberg you can create a fairly modern responsive site out of the box.
There is a plug-in for free that’ll backup the entire installation to your Google cloud and other clouds.
There are cache and SEO plugins for free to sort
that side of things out.
Ive not used it but there is woo commerce for shopping although I wouldn’t blame someone for skipping it and using shopify for ease of use.
I also love not battling with Hugo etc. at the technical level.
I do not miss reading Hugo docs thinking wtf!
Hosting for unlimited sites is costing me about $50 a year so pretty much zero.
Firebase hosting or GCS bucket + Cloudflare page rule for cache-everything.
Have used the cache-everything trick for client sites back in the day to serve a top 15 post on /r/all from a $5 Wordpress box.
Man, I'm so glad to be out of that space...
After trying several options, I currently run a ghost.org instance locally in Docker where I edit my site. Then I run a tiny shell script to scrape a static version with wget and push it to Github pages.
I use Github Pages + Jekyll for a personal blog. I just started recently. The main problem I'm facing is the limited amount of plugins you can use with Github Pages. They have only whitelisted a few [1].
You can fix this issue by building the site locally and push the generated files but it feels less "proper" to me. There is also the cache policy problem (TTL of 10 minutes) but that's minor.
[1]: https://pages.github.com/versions/
That depends on what kind of static site it is. Is it for a business or making a business impression? Then I don't know.
But if it's for personal use then the easiest is to simply install nginx from your repos on your home computer and put html and media files in directories. Then forward port 80 on your router to the IP of the computer. nginx serving static is not going to be a risk. It's extremely simple. And having everything on your local computer makes it easy to share and very fast to iterate.
I use GitHub pages for most of my project static websites using gh-pages [0] to deploy via a GitHub Action workflow. It's been working great for general static webpages, or using Vue/React.
However, there are some limitations such as if you need to add custom headers.
If you need more customization, then S3/Cloudfront also works well too. I also use Netlify and had minimal issues.
[0] https://github.com/tschaub/gh-pages
It's been suggested below, but Github Pages is a total breeze. Find a theme you like, clone the repo, add your domain (and set that stuff up) and get writing.
If you go with Jekyll, it's really nice to work with. I decided to go with GHP over hosting myself in case I ever get super famous, which will most likely never happen.
Ultimately, its easy enough that you can get writing right away. If you decide that the software isn't enough, it'll be a breeze to move somewhere else since its all markdown.
I host a bunch of static websites created using Gatsby, Hugo and Mkdocs.
The downright easiest and cheapest (free) platform I find is AWS Amplify Console. It's simply too good to be true (no affiliation).
Connects with repos on all platforms (bitbucket, gitlab, GitHub). Push to deploy. Most of my sites are still on the free tier.
If you manage your DNS with Route53, you don't even have to configure subdomains anymore, every new site's domain is automatically configured with a click.
> jumping through AWS hoops
I found S3 static hosting to be fairly straightforward. Once set up, a single `aws s3 sync . s3://my-bucket/path` updates the content.
Simple Webhosting. Cheap, reliable and unbreakable.
Single command deployment with rsync.
Plus you get serverless functionality for free with php scripts. Just place it in a folder and access it via browser.
Magic.
S3 bucket with cloudfront in front. Route 53 for DNS.
Not sure if it’s the cheapest way to do it, but it seems extremely cheap. Likewise not sure if it’s the easiest way to do it, but it seems easy now it’s set up - everything is in one place.
IIRC Cloudfront <-> S3 data transfer has quite a generous free tier.
The only thing I worry about is whether uploading objects is expensive, and invalidation. But it’s not been (noticeably) an issue so far.
I have looked into this, I found that [vuepress] https://vuepress.vuejs.org/ compiles into quite good looking static sites.
As to the hosting I am using Google Firebase Hosting for a small static site which is free for the moment.
I am in the process of setting up local hosting on my home fibre.
You can use the Azure blob storage for static websites. Costs maybe 1 or 2 cents. I think you can even hang the free Azure CDN in front of it.
For free non commercial projects, definitely netlify (they seem to imply the will remove commercial projects if they so like).
If it's a commercial project I don't see the point of paying a premium for the nice UX, hosting static files is easy enough and I don't have investors' money to waste.
I would spend my money on a CDN like BunnyCDN and throw a file server behind it.
I use vercel (or previously zeit). The free plan suits my use cases:
- tls
- github integration (although limited to personal accounts only and NOT org -- which is nutsz but I understand the rationale)
- it also comes with cloud functions, and routing which could be very powerful
I think cloudflare pages with workers offer the same set of features PLUS team and github org integration, but so far I like what vercel is offering
I pay $3/month for a VPS. Probably not the cheapest way to host, and not the smallest vps offered, but I like that I can just ssh into it and do whatever I want, if/when I want something more than nginx, or I want to configure it in a very particular way (both things did happen). The drawback is that running apt upgrade is on me.
Just a reminder you can host a static site or any other kind of site on your home computer. That's the internet folks.
If you have an MSDN subscription (e.g. through work), using your free Azure credits to host a site is a pretty good option.
ask your isp for a static ip address, attach a rasperry pi to your home network, forward port 80 and, if you're fancy, port 443 to the IP of said raspberry pi. Install a webserver (like lighttpd) buy a domain name with DNS hosting, add an A record for your domain to point to previously mentioned static IP.
Was next to free in 1999, still is.
Raspberry Pi 4, if you live in a country where ISPs actually offer you Internet rather than just download access.
I host my personal static site on a vps with nginx. It's a gatsby site so deployment is just yarn deploy, which runs gatsby build and rsyncs the build folder to the server.
Granted, it took some setup to get there, but it's pretty easy now and portable too. Can easily be switched to any other service.
I’m just pushing out rendered HTML to Azure Storage fronted by CloudFlare (the Static Web Sites feature takes index.html and 404.html and just works).
Rendering (which is custom and optimized for minimal delta updates) is done on a tiny VM that hosts other services, triggered by a GitHub hook.
How much small print do you accept? How legally reliable do you want it? How much effort do you want to put in?
Without smallprint it's either self-host on a raspi at home + some dyndns (cost near 0, larger initial effort)
or EUR 2 per month for shared hosting (in germany).
FTP-it to a friends' server.
For static sites, GitHub pages is extremely easy, if you're already using GitHub to host the code. You follow a few lines of code to stick a deploy script into your repository, point your domain, and you're done.
Having just had a site that went to the top of Hacker News and got a very sudden spike of traffic, I'd highly recommend Vercel.
It's super quick to set up, and you can have a mix of static/dynamic content on the same site.
I love https://blot.im/ if you have Dropbox, then there's no deploy. It's just there. You can also use git , of course.
Depending on how you measure cheapness and easiness, I made https://codasite.app
You type HTML and click "deploy." It's free.
I use the Cloud Run free tier.
I just build a tiny busybox image and serve the static pages via httpd. It‘s git push to Github to deploy. Obviously not a low tech solution, but was still fun to build.
I’m using AWS Amplify Console and am very happy with it. All pay as you go so it’s super cheap. You can also hook into other AWS services if you want to start expanding capabilities.
Digital Ocean Apps, you get free hosting for a couple static site, you just push to the selected branch.
I use Hugo but they support a bunch of different types.
Digital Ocean is also just super easy to use in general.
Which of those you recommend allow me to password protect some (preview/staging) content both with list of custom users/passwords and integrated with some external SSO ?
It's Netlify. Just point it at your git repo and give it a build command. It has CDN, DNS even lambdas. And deploy per branch. It's one-click setup from github.
I use a single vps from OVH. Something like 5 dollars a month.
I host a Wordpress site on hostinger, shared hosting costs under a buck per month for long term commitment .
No free or cheap , doesn’t have much controls but can’t complain a lot either
I've played with a free .tk domain and use their framed redirect (http only) to point to a itty.bitty.site page. Works transparently as far as a user goes.
Set up a github repo.
Buy a domain.
Add a CNAME file that has the domain in caps.
Deploy github repo to github pages.
Go to your domain and see the magic.
AWS has Amplify Console which wraps up static site building, s3, cloudfront, custom domains, pull request previews, etc.
If you’re already on AWS I’d recommend giving it a shot.
I'm still on HostGator for my smaller sites. I have a DreamHost account, but it's a logger for something, not a publicly visible site.
If you're looking for ease of deployment I think something like org-publish. But that would require some setup - anything would really.
GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel (former ZEIT) and the non-official winner: surge.sh, the absolute simplest way to publish a static website.
Firebase hosting + Gatsby has been real easy for me
Glitch.com is my go-to static site/tinker w nodejs container. Super easy, generous free sku. Put it behind cloudflare if you need.
It seems that no one mentioned SourceForge so far. I have used it for over a decade. You rsync your html to their htdocs and that is it.
I used to use Heroku for side projects and I recently discovered Netlify and it is definitely super easy to get set up and deploy.
Github pages is almost free, supports SSL, simple as it gets, no need to buy a CNAME and your website might live for ever :-)
I use Site44. It's hosting synced to your Dropbox folder.
Just edit your index.html locally and it's pushed when your Dropbox syncs.
i use Krystal web hosting (uk)
£4.99 for basic account
£9.99 unlimited subsite account (my choice)
No need to run daemons or maintain packages or configure backups
You can configure ssh access to put files
To deploy I use lftp which takes ftp commands from stdin and can do a recursive mput very similar to rsync
so I run my hand built deploy.pl which calls a subscript like this
time ./scripts/push_to_cdn.pl | lftp
GitHub pages. It's free, you just have to push to a git repository to update it and it allows custom domain names.
Google Cloud run although not free is great for many situations, like if your website is not static and is low traffic.
Vercel. Sign in with Github, push and it's deployed. Probably the best Developer Experience I've ever had.
Google App Engine, anyone?
If you decide to move from static to something more complex, you have bunch of languages to choose from.
Firebase is stupid easy to host static sites on.
I think it's like 2-4 cli commands.
Only downside: it's Google.
Surge.sh is probably the easiest and fastest. Host a static site in one command.
I like Netlify for most stuff personally.
Anybody using S3 static hosting? How does that compare to some of these others, specifically on price?
Question for these recommendations: what type of visitor stats or analytics do they provide by default? If you are using a static site without embedding some analytics, what can they show you (e.g. just overall bandwidth, number of unique visitors, etc.)? I know Netlify just has on their free tier bandwidth per month, last I checked.
My ISP gives me 10MB of free hosting with FTP access.
Doesn't get much simpler than:
ftp-upload -h myisp.net index.html
Firebase Hosting is actually very very easy to use and very "tranditional".
Have you tried yahoo geocities?
I host my .org on Github Pages.
Google Cloud Storage can host static sites and has a free forever tier
I'm trying out Cloudflare Pages, it's pretty good so far.
Github pages is pretty easy if you don't need a custom name.
I wouldn't say jumping through AWS hoop is loads of setup.. but I have 2 static sites with domain setup on AWS with S3 buckets and route53 and they cost about $3 per month in total.
Domain costs are separate but I don't think that belong here.
AWS Amplify. Free for a year, doesn’t even need to be static.
My Favs:
- Cloudflare
- AWS s3
- Github pages
- Google
Discovered netlify the other day and wow is it simple
At least for Jekyll, GitHub Pages has been excellent.
Digital Ocean App Platform gives 3 free static sites.
Has anyone tested out netlify vs cloudflare pages?
I use S3's static site hosting. works great.
strikingly.com is also nice for simple websites which you build with their editor; however not flexible to do custom things or uploads
Which ones work with Tor (without captchas?)
Hugo, nearly free speech and a Makefile.
How about OVH with an rsync?
Firebase hosting work well.
Encode html code as Base64, use link shortener, and viola - static page "hosted".
github pages, gitlab pages, netlify free version
geocities!! ops. sorry, wrong century
It isn't free -- it is pretty cheap -- but it has a lot going for it. It requires no custom tooling -- I upload via rsync. This makes it trivial to migrate to a new provider if necessary.
I develop my site locally, then rsync it up. I have a custom domain pointed at the site, and also a custom .htaccess, so I have a good amount of control over the site. I do things like serve html without the .html filetype in the url; e.g. https://zck.org/emacsconf2020 is stored on the server as emacsconf2020.html . (I do this so Emacs recognizes the files as html, but keeps the urls clean).
It's a nice tool if you want to get a little involved in your setup, without getting wrapped up in proprietary tooling. It does charge for what you use, so it's not a great site if you are going to host Blu-ray images that get downloaded from everyone on HN.
Netlify is really easy. Just drag and drop your static site's folder.
Stay away from Github pages, my entire Github account got permanently suspended becuase I had a pornographic image on my Page. That's not allowed apparently.
I'll stick with Cloudflare for now