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Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end
- hnal943 6y ago...any backend that is a content-heavy website? Or are they somehow also abstracting away the application logic? How is this different from a CDN cache?
- tiborsaas 6y agoI was about to post the same question, it's a very similar, but it seems more complicated than just going with CloudFlare. I think they are pretty close in performance boost, but I wouldn't place my bets yet :)
- DoctorOW 6y agoTypically CDN caches are cleared after X amount of time, or are cleared manually. This solution generates your entire website as static HTML and viewer requests never actually reach the backend.
- m1guelpf 6y agoIt also makes sure your whole website is cached at build time instead of needing a first request to generate the cache
- xwdv 6y agoThe way it abstracts application logic is by finding out what parts of your site can be immutable functions, then produces all the variations of static content for each possible input.
- hashamali 6y agoThis is extremely impressive for an 18 year old, well done!
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- ollerac 6y agoI think you mean extremely impressive for any solo founder, period.
- temporama1 6y agoI think you mean extremely impressive for any human, period.
- grafs50 6y agoMaking it even more impressive for someone who is all 3 ;)
- maddydugar 6y agoMaking it even more impressive, that he has already contributed to 500 open-source projects! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/m1guelpf https://www.buymeacoffee.com/m1guelpf
- joshdance 6y agoI read this as 'generate a static website for any backyard' and got excited for some reason. :) gardening?
- winrid 6y agoNice UI, value prop, and pricing. Well done!
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- arkitaip 6y agoThere is hope for this industry when a 18-yo creates such an amazing conversion centric landing page. Well done, m1guelpf.
- jaywalk 6y agoHow can $20/month flat pricing realistically work? What if I've got a content-heavy site that gets a lot of traffic? Will I get hit with a surprise bill, or will you eat the costs and just cut me off? It's a great idea for a service, but the pricing just seems too simplistic.
- m1guelpf 6y agoThe hosting is managed by Vercel, who recently announced unlimited bandwidth on their free plan [1] [1]: https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing
- nkozyra 6y agoYikes. So the bigger question then is what happens when they change this? Or go away. Also, have you seen what "Additionally, different hard limits apply for each plan." means on their pricing page[1]? Domain limits, maximum files, etc? What those might mean when you scale beyond expectation? I don't mean to discourage. But big vendors pull the rug out from under people all the time, sometimes ruining a business because there's no viable alternative. Make sure your eggs can be put in different baskets if need be. [1] https://vercel.com/docs/v2/platform/limits https://vercel.com/docs/v2/platform/limits
- jaywalk 6y agoYeah, that's almost worse. It means Sitesauce is relying on the generosity of their vendor for their business model to work.
- quickthrower2 6y agoWell they could also connect to upload to s3, netlify, github pages, GitLab pages, to name the free or pretty cheap static hosts I can think of!
- lwhalen 6y agoHow does it play with Squarespace sites? I didn't see that mentioned as one of their supported back-ends.
- code_duck 6y ago>Without access to your backend, there's no way for anyone to steal sensitive data or deface your website. No way? At all? Why could they not deface or alter the static version? Of course there's a lot less attack surface but that doesn't mean it's invulnerable.
- madsbuch 6y agoVercel has a 16000 files limit (That we hit). How do you handle big sites? Edit: This is not a problem for a lot of pages. But to me that is a deal breaker to use Vercel for any medium or large sized projects.
- racket 6y agoThis costs $20/month, what happens when someone releases an open source version that essentially does the same thing but for free?
- eyelidlessness 6y agoSome people will use the open source tool and other people will gladly pay money to have someone else manage it for them. Pretty much the same as any service that provides a (real or perceived) value and has open source alternatives.
- dubcanada 6y agoWhat a rude comment. You can literally ask this on every single Show HN thread.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoNothing, because people don't flock to self-hosted open source just because it exists. Else Slack/Discord would be dead. Effectively nobody uses their open source competitors because the experience is terrible rather than a service that takes it out of your hands in a nice package.
- snowwrestler 6y agoOpen source tools already exist. Wget can and is used to build out static copies of websites. It's also possible to get most of the benefit by using a reverse proxy cache with super long TTLs and a targeted purging strategy to handle content updates. If you're tempted to point out that those approaches are a pain to use and don't work perfectly, well a) welcome to a lot of open source, and b) that's why commercial ventures can still succeed.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoFree? Let's be clear. There is no such thing. Ever. Everything has a cost. You can spend money. Or you can spend time. But either way, you will spend. For example, Product X is $20 per month. To do the same yourself is 60 to 90 minutes per month. It's fair that you might not mind the time. You want to learn something new. But the idea that you're saving $20 per month is the wrong lens.
- neya 6y agoI love this site. It's truly impressive for any solo founder, regardless of the age, let along an 18 year old. Yeah, you kind of rely on the generosity of your vendor (Vercel, in this case), but that's really the only option if you want to keep costs low. I hated Wordpress so much so that I wrote my own CMS + static site generator using a different approach and used it for clients who run sites with 3 million+ visitors a month currently. Once we made that move, we realized how horribly slow was Wordpress even on the best hardware thrown at it. Our costs dropped down to 1/10th of what we used to spend as well purely in terms of hardware. I can easily believe that static sites are the future. I think this space has a lot of room for new players and definitely worth to keep a watch on. All the best. Hope you see success. Neya
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- zapt02 6y agoThis is a cute story, but what was -actual- the cost (time, monetary and opportunity) in building your own CMS instead of applying basic performance tweaks to an off the shelf system?
- kfk 6y agoWell I had to do our corporate team site and got so frustrated with SharePoint that I coded a script in python to generate the html from rst files. It was a couple of days of work. It runs behind nginx and automatically updated on GitHub commit of new content. Bootstrap is very well documented and you can use rst directives for “widgets”. I am in the process of moving to markdown + yaml now to make writing content even easier.
- dewey 6y agoWhy not just use any other static site generator like Hugo instead of re-inventing it?
- artificial 6y agoI've browsed the site and didn't see how are forms handled?
- js2 6y agoBottom of the front page: > Sitesauce recommends the use of JAMstack-friendly alternatives to this services. For example, you could move your contact forms to StaticKit or your comments to Commento. > However, there are times where the only option is to rely on your backend. For this, you can configure Sitesauce to proxy certain endpoints to your backend. You can also use this if you need to fetch some data from your backend via AJAX.
- artificial 6y agoThank you! All I could think about was contact forms and other opportunities intakes. Missed that.
- jetti 6y agoLet me start off by saying good job on launching. Is there an ability to stop automatic deployments on change and instead allow for manual deployments? Also, I am a bit confused about the hosting. On your landing page you say: "Sitesauce hosts your static sites on Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost." Then in your Terms of Service you say: "You agree that Sitesauce is not responsible for any additional fees charged to your credit card by third-party server providers such as Vercel." How does the hosting work? Do I sign up with Sitesauce and also sign up for Vercel? If that is the case, would I be able to pick a different host if I wanted? If it isn't the case and Sitesauce handles the backend process of creating an account on Vercel is it paid for by using my credit card and you pass that info to Vercel?
- m1guelpf 6y agoSitesauce allows you to login with your Vercel account once you create an account with us. Once you've done that, we use their API to set everything we need up.
- jetti 6y agoIn that case perhaps the wording on the front page should be: "Sitesauce publishes your static sites to Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost." That makes it clear that you aren't the one hosting and that it is actually Vercel. My initial understanding was that you would pull my data and host it yourself using Vercel as your host. Since you are using the host's API do you have any plans to integrate with other hosts, such as AWS?
- kevmo314 6y agoWow this is pretty cool! Seems like a great tool to throw onto an existing CMS, allowing clients to retain the flexibility of editing their website directly. Does this deal with/forward dynamic content on the same domain? Or do admin panels, etc have to be hosted on a separate subdomain? EDIT: Wow, Miguel is even completely transparent (https://sitesauce.app/open https://sitesauce.app/open) with his revenue and costs. That's incredibly inspiring to see from an 18 year old.
- treebornfrog 6y agoI like it, will have to try this on my wp site. Thank you for creating this. It's a great product, something I'd happily pay $20 for. I think you should perhaps market this to the SEO community. They care tons about pagespeed. Also, set up an affiliate program. All the best!
- bgdam 6y agoWow, I've considered building this exact same app for about 11 years now, but I never did it because I thought there would never be a large enough market to make it successful. Kudos to you for actually building and launching! Hope you have a lot of success and prove me wrong about the market size. EDIT: After going through the site and your video, it appears as though you crawl the dynamic site, and generate static pages out of it. It's not really clear if you support sites that render on the client side. Do you?
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- eggsthedev 6y agoWow, good job! As a fellow teenager, it really encourages me that it's possible to launch something successfully without making it your full-time job :)
- quickthrower2 6y agoThere is absolutely no reason a teenager can’t nail these sorts of projects. And often being young has some big advantages in terms of not having got too comfortable with a salaried job and knowing what the next generation wants. My advice (teenager or not) is join online communities like indie hackers and get all the help because anyone doing this at any age needs to learn diverse skills, it’s not just about having an idea and coding.
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoBecause of losing my backups of my WordPress website this is a great solution I can just have a static website for my clients
- abinaya_rl 6y agoThis is looking great, I'm wondering if you folks can support webflow.com exports?
- oefrha 6y agoLanding page feedback: the backend that keeps changing (“like X-powered websites”) could cause the whole page to jump. This is very annoying on narrow viewports (e.g. mobile), especially when I’m reading text, for instance the FAQ.
- quickthrower2 6y agoAnd super nitpick but the font used connects s and t and it really looks out of place to me.
- tomstoms 6y agoInteresting product! But I find the font really annoying especially the st ligature.
- WordSkill 6y agoRequiring a credit card before any functionality is enabled breaks the WordPress.org plugin directory guidelines. To be compliant, the 7-day free trial should be possible without having to provide credit card details. That is, in any case, best practice, unless profiting from people who forget to cancel is an important part of your business plan.
- WordSkill 6y agoSite design is a direct rip from https://www.designjoy.co/ https://www.designjoy.co/
- npv789 6y agothis is game changer