Founder of netlify and BitBalloon here. We are working on an editing interface for static websites that can compete with the ease of use and flexibility of wor

Founder of netlify and BitBalloon here. We are working on an editing interface for static websites that can compete with the ease of use and flexibility of wordpress. Our alpha users love it and this is an open source project. We've been working in this space for quite a while, and are extremely excited about the potential for static web-tech. We started out with simple drag and drop deploys at BitBalloon (you don't even need to zip your site first, just drag a folder unto BitBalloon.com). Later we launched our premium solution called netlify that's by far the most feature rich on the market (continuous deployment, form processing, API proxying, redirects, rewrite rules, SSL, etc, etc) and offers the best performance you'll get today. It's spot on that the really big deal will be solving the CMS need, without making developers give up on all the advantages of static site generators. Some of our larger clients are using netlify + roots/middleman/metalsmith/etc + Contentful/Prismic/etc to build large CMS drives sites that are built up front and hosted directly on our CDN, but this is still a bit too advances a setup for the millions and millions of normal CMS driven sites out there. Our solution is building a completely open-source CMS that works with all common static site generators. It's in private beta right now, but getting real close to opening up the repo to the public. It’s completely free of any lock-in, and you can take it and host it anywhere with ease. Happy to send an invite to anyone here. Just ping me at matt@netlify.com Some feedback to the product of this thread: Love the initiative. Drag and drop uploads are nice, but unless you handle CDN configuration and cache invalidation, it doesn't seem like a big step up from just FTPing files to an S3 bucket. Otherwise you might risk mainly appealing to beginners or people looking for a cheap way to publish a personal website, and those can't pay much. With a monthly price of $1/site, the life-time value of a client will be very low, so you will barely be able to spend anything on customer acquisition. One.com, GoDaddy or S3 can offer extremely low prices because they have huge scale, but as a tiny startup, you have no way of reaching the amount of users you would need to get on board with a model like that. Especially since this is way more technical than Wix/Weebly/SquareSpace,etc, while not really offering real value to professional developers or agencies. If you want to build in the static hosting space, you should start by figuring out if there's something you could offer beyond what the existing players like netlify, BitBalloon, CloudCannon, Divshot, etc, already have, and make sure you're not just trying to compete on price. My 5 cents written in 5 minutes :) Good Luck!