What are you using to host your static sites?
Post what service you're using below. This is for purely static site hosting, whether your site is plain HTML, React, Vue, Angular or something else, it doesn't matter.
Here are a few I've used in the past but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on something great and want to hear what everyone else uses.
Render
GitLab Pages
Firebase Hosting
I'm going to add additional services, from the comments, to help anyone who wants a quick overview.
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Netlify everything else is subpar.
+1 for Netlify, but I really wish they would fix their form feature. No notifications for submissions, and no way to bulk delete spam messages with a couple of clicks.
Netlify fan #1 here, hello haha.
That said I don't use the forms because it auto rolls into paid tier if you go over the quota and the quota is very low. I am using firebase and cloud functions to process form submissions and save them to firebase. I also added slack app to notify our team of received messages. Although you have to upgrade the firebase app if you want to call 3rd party apis from cloud functions, so if I was starting over now, I would create a simple app engine server that saves the message to firestore and notifies slack. This is max 4 h effort to build IMO.
The quota is fine to try things, and for my consulting company where the inquiries are not so high. The other things are a little beyond my abilities at the moment LOL.
Are you looking for a paid form submission service or just a free one?
I’m working on something right now and if you’re interested and available I’d love to talk with you about what you’re looking for in a form submissions service.
I like to start free-ish to try things, and then I will pay for the things that I'm going to push forward. I'm using Carrd which is nearly free, and a good service for landing pages, but I don't like the email capture services it connects to. I can't find one where I can have a master account and then collect emails from multiple sites to separate lists, and respond to each list from the respective custom email addresses. It seems like many Indie Hackers would have this same issue. I'm sure it's solved, and would be happy to hear where / how. (BTW - I'm not a dev, I can make static sites.)
I never used their form feature, good to know.
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Is that how to get the notifications? Kinda lame in my opinion. I use custom domains with email, and want my notifications with the submission info to go there.
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I will look again and eat my words if it's the case. I have never been able to find a way to enter an email address for form submission notifications to go to, per site.
Well, thank you for letting me know that it exists. I feel like a dumb-*ss, but swear this notification feature didn't exist when I setup my last few sites. This had been holding me back from using Netlify to host more landing pages. Happy Canada day!
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Another vote for Netlify. Very easy, but also very powerful API and some nice features (super easy forms). Server side analytics could be better though...
I love their plugins as well, they can really help optimize your page by stripping unnecessary HTML and CSS for example, or keeping a cache if you use Gatsby or NextJS.
AWS S3 with CloudFront, Route 53 and Certificate Manager.
I have been using for years now and I don't think I have ever paid anything.
Drop the files in a public S3 bucket, set up the CloudFront CDN, Route 53 for your DNS records and Certificate Manager for your SSL certificates. Takes less than 5 minutes and your website is highly available.
+1. Takes not time at all to setup a new site once you have done it once and it has not failed me in years.
If you use AWS for your DNS and have your domain as a hosted zone you pay $0.50 per month.
For each site I have 2 S3 buckets and 2 cloud front distributions. One
domain.tldand the otherwww.domain.tld. The non www version just forwards traffic to the www one but it allows for SSL for the root domain and subdomain.I believe you can do with only one CloudFront distribution.
You can set your SSL certificate to be for both your root domain and all
*.domain.tldIn the DNS records of your
domain.tldyou can add a CNAME record which redirects yourwwwto the root domain.In your CloudFront distribution settings your can list multiple alternate domains, just add both your root domain and your
wwwThat's how I do, can simplify your "architecture" and maybe reduce the near zero bill.
With that setup what happens when you got directly to the https versions of root and www?
https://www.domain.tld
https://domain.tld
When I was playing around with it a few years ago one of those would not return and not redirect due to https / SSL depending on the setup.
At the time I didn't have my domain managed by AWS which meant the root had to be either an A record or a redirect. It could not be a CNAME or a special AWS A record alias. To use CloudFront with a CNAME I then had to run the site on
wwwand redirect to it from root. In turn this caused the root to www redirect to fail on HTTPS.Testing certs, domain names and sub domains is a pain due to DNS propagation and I may not have been thorough enough.
If HTTPS on both of the above work and the fact I have some of my domains in AWS as hosted zones I can perhaps use AWS's A name aliases to get it to work? Although then I may need to move away from using
wwwwhich wouldn't be ideal but I'll know for next time.I have everything managed on AWS, SSL certs are for both root and
*.domain.tld. This means a CNAME record pointingwwwto root is enough. Also, root is an A alias to the CloudFront distribution.Seconding this - that's my current setup as well - just need a wildcard cert.
I have looked at AWS a few times and been curious for a long time. Also, I use Google cloud heavily so familiar with a competitive service.
The issue I have with getting started with AWS is figuring out what services to use. I don't want to go at this blind in fear of accidentally running up a huge cost. I may have exhausted the trial already, I'm not sure. The thought of having to take some course to figure this out is ridiculous in my mind, it should not be that hard.
All you all who use AWS, how did you all figure this out?
Second question: how do you deploy updates? is it some command line tool like gcloud has, or can you easily setup to build when changes are deployed to a repo?
I think taking a course would do. Tons of hands-on lab. Also, if you incur any charges. Hit the billing folks up t
hey're generous about knocking off bills easily. That part I give their customer service a plus.
I wasn't clear enough - I meant having to take a course seems excessive. Is there some 20 min getting started tutorial?
Oh, I see, here's a link for a hands-on 30 mins tutorial https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/host-static-website/
AWS documentation is a little overwhelming, especially, when you don't work in that environment often. For ease start with getting your website running with just the S3 bucket endpoint. Then the rest you can configure as needed. Regarding updates, you can do it via the buckets where your HTML, JS, and CSS assets are or via Cloudfront caching, which lets you invalidate your objects. Also, if you're going to use the free SSL certificate they offer make sure you're doing HTTP to HTTPS redirect on your Cloudfront distribution behavior if not you'll keep getting errors. I have got a website running for months on this architecture and I'm yet to incur any bill other than $12 for securing the domain via AWS Route 53 and the $0.50 monthly charge for a hosted zone that runs the nameservers and alias DNS records for the domain itself. The only downside to this architecture is having to build a REST API because S3 buckets are restricted to only GET requests on your bucket endpoints. I'm new on IH but hit me up if you run into issues.
Excellent! this is exactly what I wanted to find.
Also welcome to indiehackers!
Curious, why not use a service like Netlify or GitHub pages which is free and takes no setup?
I also use AWS S3/Cloudfront and agree with the ease of setup mentioned in the parent. I would much rather pay 10 cents a month to AWS than use a service for free. Relying on someone's goodwill seems suboptimal compared to paying a fair price for a service provided.
I like netlify very much but Github pages is half baked because:
routing sucks for certain single page apps, such as create-react-app. I need ability to customize headers which netlify allows me to do but gh pages does not AFAIK.
you still have to setup builds e.g. using travis-ci which is fine after you've done it once, but it is yet another extra step.
I have some old websites on GitHub pages, it's a pretty good service. I think it's a question of finding the right balance between effort and control with your architecture. I don't find managing the aforementioned AWS products unnecessarily difficult and the cost is near zero. They do not slow me down in my development or deployment processes and I have a greater control over "what is going on" compared to services with higher levels of abstraction.
Vercel is the best in class
It seems Netlify is getting more love here. As a Netlify user myself, can you explain why I might want to try switching to Vercel?
On the free plan: unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth, top tier customer support (I was running into an issue and it got fixed in a few hours).
Vercel gives you an immutable url for every commit you make
In Vercel you can run server side code like Nextjs or any nodejs based server, this code runs on the edge globally
With netlify you can run only static stuff on a cdn
Vercel + Next.JS the perfect combo to host static websites.
I have been using this since it is very easy CI to deploy any changes instantly, and also SSR + SSG, incremental caching as well.
Netlify! Free to start, hooks into CI pipelines with easy, supports custom domains and SSL. Can't recommend it enough
I’ve actually used Netlify in the past.
My issue with them is that they have next to no support for their free tier. No support email or contact form or anything.
I even have a bug where I can’t add my custom domain to their DNS settings on my account and have no way to resolve it.
It’s honestly pretty disappointing cause I hear so many great things about them all the time but $45/month minimum for support is too high.
I think you'll fine the same with basically every one of the platforms that has a free tier you'll have the same level of support - Real support is only for paying customers!
I had a problem on my domain and DNS too and the support answered me.
They were not super fast but that's better than nothing.
I still spent hours (days?) configuring it.
So, the service is great but if you need a back-end and a DB, it gets messy. I rather have everything in one place.
Interesting, how did you contact support?
Through the forum:
https://community.netlify.com/t/dns-lookup-takes-10s/15122
Thanks so much for the help!
I actually somehow stumbled upon a support contact form on their site that I couldn’t find before 🤦♂️ so hopefully they answer me. If not I’ll message them on the forum and hopefully get my issues resolved.
Netlify, connected with my GitHub private repository. Works really fast and so far meets my needs.
I use Github Pages with a custom domain and Zola as my static site engine (as opposed to the default Jekyll).
I commit my Zola project into one branch and I use Github Actions to build and push the compiled code into another branch that is served. For what it's worth, my repo is public because you can't host on Github Pages for free with private repos.
We use our own service Fast.io - We sync your static site/assets to CloudFlare from your cloud storage. Just deploy your site files to Dropbox/GoogleDrive/OneDrive etc... and they're synced out with every change.
Our IndieHackers Profile: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/fast-io
Did you design that homepage? It's simple and great.
Thanks! I can't take the credit as it was a team effort. We have a new homepage coming soon too.
I have tried Surge and Github Pages. In fact, Designtack is on github pages. Both are the best for me.
I host on Zeit/Vercel and build my sites using Gatsby.js. I have used Google Pages in the past too, but something like Vercel gives you more flexibility and makes more sense than having your static output stored in a git repo.
Currently using Netlify and AWS Amplify in combination with https://gohugo.io/
At the moment I'm leaning to Amplify.
It really depends for me. If I'm hosting something like a basic HTML site or a react app, I'll often just go with S3. Other times, I'll use Netlify since they have a generous free tier. I've tried GitHub pages and Render as well, but neither of them are quite as good, imo.
You can use Hugo and GitHub Pages to host your static website.
I wrote an article about How to Create a Static Site With A Contact Us form
and host it on GitHub pages.
https://fabform.io/a/create-a-static-website-with-contact-form-on-github-pages
I use AWS S3, Cloudfront and Route53 for my production environment... and Netlify for my UAT environment. I tend to work with a develop and master branch in Github, with the master branch hooking into CircleCI each time I pull in from develop to trigger a CI process that builds my project, puts it in a S3 bucket and invalidates my caches. Pushes to develop trigger my Netlify CI process.
What tipped me over from github pages to Netlify was needing more plugins (such as for internationalization support), which github pages simply does not support.
S3 + Route 53 + Cloudfront + ACM is also an option for those familiar with AWS. For everyone else though, Netlify is what I would recommend.
I use the below stack to set up a free static site server for my partner who owns a custom domain:
It's not for everyone, but it works for me. Since I set it up for the past year, I received down time emails only once, so the site was running fine most of the time. You can check my blog here.
I use Jekyll + Github pages. It's pretty straight forward and easy. But looking at the comments I might try Netlify now
I use Bunnycdn for geo-distributed storage and global high performance CDN. Keycdn is also a good option but bit expensive.
I get better performance than Netlify.
I'm not technical...is godaddy recommended as a hosting site? Is there one that connects both registrar and hosting?
Just migrated to Netlify from AWS. For me it wasn't cutting it + I've worked extensively with AWS for the past 4 years + I got $5K AWS credits.
Webflow
A lot of them are interchangeable at this point; static site hosting has become a commodity.
It's like nails at that hardware store. Who sells the best nails? Most of them do pretty much the same thing, and get the job done, for minimal cost. It doesn't particularly matter if you buy them from Home Depot, Lowe's, or the local hardware store.
Just like no builder is going to go out of business due to the cost of nails - you're either making way more than they cost, or you're not in the business - no one's going to quit blogging because they got priced out on one of the major providers.
I personally use AWS and it gets the job done, but then so do many others.
I use Wordpress running locally (free using Local by Flywheel: https://localwp.com ) then I convert to a static website using WebCopy ( https://www.cyotek.com/cyotek-webcopy ). I then host the static website on Azure static sites and Azure CDN for cents per month. Using Wordpress makes editing etc. so quick and easy. My website: https://www.formuladesk.com
For UpStamps I am using Vercel
Vercel (previously now)... with Nextjs. <3
We make many different sites so for us it was really important that the setup we choose could handle many different scenarios.
Also we wanted to have the hosting in Denmark to honor some GDPR.
Finally we wanted services really close to each other for performance reasons. Db near app
We choose to setup some Ubuntu containers and installed Dokku which is selfhosted heroku.
Dokku is like Lego - you can so most stuff with easy to use commands.
On dokku we run nextjs sites mongo postgressql nodejs all running static and non static as you want. Also graphql endpoints etc. Even runs some docker containers. Of course letaencrypt module. Deploys via GitHub.
It's extreme performant and has never failed us.
I've been using Firebase hosting for most of my projects since I had already been using other Firebase offerings such as functions and analytics.
I'd definitely recommend Netlify for anything else though, with the exception of maybe Vercel if you're building a Next.js app.
Netlify. Hosts everything from https://flowist.io frontend, to https://www.jwbaldwin.com
So easy, so fast.
I really like Jigsaw by the folks at Tigthen. It works just like a Laravel app which is really nice. Then, I just push the static site to S3 with CloudFront. Super easy and fast performance.
I'm happy with Firebase Hosting
Hugo + Firebase Hosting - aravind.dev
I recently started working in relaunching my personal blog. I am using Hugo for static site generation. Then I plan to auto deploy and build Hugo using AWS Codepipeline to S3. So all I have to do to publish a post is to push a new Markdown file to my repo and everything else is automated. This will give me the freedom to write and publish content from my iPad, iPhone, or computer.
Netlify is so good it's hard to consider others.
I pay under $10 / month for a Hetzner CX21 VPS (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB + 50GB disk, 20TB traffic) and host a number of my Hugo sites there, as well as some Wordpress sites.
It's convenient having your own server setup. Most recently I used this for https://lazarfocused.com/ a Hugo site for my Lazar Focus side-project product.
Not only are you the only person who is using your own setup for a static site, I went to check out your site and it loaded almost instantly. Just goes to show that sometimes putting in a little extra work is really worth it.
👏👏👏
What are the underlying technologies and frameworks you're using for Lazar Focus?
I built Lazar Focus using Lazarus IDE, hence the strange spelling of "Laser" in the app's name. :)
The app is all self-contained Windows exe of about 5.5MB, which runs in about that much RAM.
That is extremely interesting! That means the language is Pascal?
Did you use any framework or just Vanilla Pascal?
Well, it's indeed Pascal, but with everything Lazarus (an open source Delphi clone) has available and finally some win32 API secret sauce. ;)
Cool, that sounds awesome. I’m
also curious what you’re using for your site, plain HTML or some kind of framework?
Ah right, I use Hugo for all of my static sites, and what you see on lazarfocused.com is a customized version of the NorthendLab theme: https://themes.gohugo.io/northendlab-hugo/
It's already been said, but I have to stress how great Netlify has been. Netlify CMS is also a great headless CMS solution if you're looking for a no cost hosting for a headless CMS solution
Netlify it is a super awesome!
Netlify for life 😄
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