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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

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.

florigator123 6y ago
Haven't tried Netlify or Cloudfare pages, but I use GH pages for my personal blog (running Jekyll) and I've never seen any reason to switch. You need to know how to use Git and Github, but since you're reading HN you probably know these things. It's really convenient to be able to just push to GH and have it auto-deploy - and it's free. 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.
foobar33333 6y ago
gitlab pages is better imo. You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files.
- gala8y 6y ago
  Also, GitLab allows business websites in GitLab pages in free tier, as opposed to Netlify and Github. "With GitLab Pages, you can publish static websites directly from a repository in GitLab. Use for any personal or business website."
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    GitHub allows business websites, AFAIK. Where did you get the notion, that it does not?
    - bombcar 6y ago
      https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#guidelines-for-using-github-pages https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/... "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)." Now one could read that as "don't build a SaaS on top of GitHub Pages", but you could also read that as "don't have business websites on GitHub Pages".
      - shhsshs 6y ago
        That wording specifically disallows both commercial sites and SaaS, so it should be read as both "don't build a SaaS on top of GitHub Pages" and "don't have business websites on GitHub Pages"
- lights0123 6y ago
  > You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files. That is Netlify and Cloudflare Pages' defining feature, and GitHub has had that for a few years now.
- jedbrown 6y ago
  Notably, it's easy to make a review site that integrates with a merge request so you can see it before deploying and get visual reviews any time you have multiple stakeholders. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/
ignoramous 6y ago
I use both pages.dev and netlify.com: pages.dev, even in open beta, is a fantastic product if it suits all your needs, but the limitations [0], if you hit them, are a dead-end and there are no ETAs as to when some of those limitations would be addressed. 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 https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites
- benatkin 6y ago
  How do you know that Netlify is production ready? I found Netlify Identity to not be production ready* and now I'm not so sure about the rest of the platform. * 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/117 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.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    > How do you know that Netlify is production ready? I meant in a way that pages.dev is in "open beta" and netlify.com don't market themselves as such. Besides, in my personal experience, I never hit any issue with netlify that didn't have a solution.
- no_wizard 6y ago
  There is a strong chance that when Pages comes out of beta, Worker Sites is going to be transitioned into Pages, at least thats kind of how I feel about some of the verbiage on this page: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/migrations/migrating-from-workers https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/migrations/migrating...
pydry 6y ago
The feature that made me change from github pages to netlify was 302s. Cloudflare pages doesn't seem to have that.
- avianlyric 6y ago
  You need to use Cloudflare page rules, which has some limits, but works fine for www. redirects etc. For everything else it expects your SPA to handle it.
- eastdakota 6y ago
  Stay tuned. Lots of these Cloudflare Page niddles getting fixed in a few weeks.
- TurkishPoptart 6y ago
  What is 302s?
  - detaro 6y ago
    (temporary) redirects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302
jacobp100 6y ago
I actually just went the other way. I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures, and the page would not work sometimes in Safari with default settings. 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 https://github.com/jacobp100/jacob-does-code - there's also a blog post about how the build system works.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Usually when I need static site hosting, I don't want to build myself a great setup - I want to click a few buttons and have a great setup. 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...
- bombcar 6y ago
  Safari + IPv6 = find out a lot about crosswalks and stoplights.
- sedachv 6y ago
  > I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures 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."
  - Jamie9912 6y ago
    This is something that is configurable though. If you leave your Firewall security mode to default, then yes it will block IPs with bad rep. If I don't care about anti-ddos, I just set the Firewall security to Low, and create a Firewall rule to allow everything from 0.0.0.0/0, simple as that.
singhrac 6y ago
I should warn that bike shedding about this distinction is absolutely not worth your time if you’re reading this and have less than like 100 blog posts written or are running a business on these sites (in which case I think you should pick Netlify). Go write something.
- ipaddr 6y ago
  Now you have something to write about.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    Yup, it's almost a joke at this point, that the first post on a technical blog is usually about how they build their static blog.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  And also, who cares it's a static host and you can change to another one in an afternoon. There's zero lock-in when you're only rsyncing some files around. Just make sure you have total control over your DNS (buy a domain, put it on a good DNS host) and you really can't screw things up too badly.
  - jefftime 6y ago
    Who would you consider good DNS hosts? I'm looking at setting up a static site and am new to the whole process
    - miloignis 6y ago
      Gandi.net is my favorite - their motto is "No BS" and I've found that to be true.
      - mssundaram 6y ago
        I've used Gandi.net for the past 18 years and can agree
MaulingMonkey 6y ago
> Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying. You can configure github projects to source from a different branch (including your main/master branch if you check in build artifacts directly)
anothernewdude 6y ago
Cloudflare wouldn't work well for me. Filling a captcha everytime to have a page load is stupid.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I know what I do to get that prompt (ahem porn), I can’t imagine what does it on every page load.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    IPv6 and aggressive anti third party cookies seem to trigger it pretty well.
Arkanosis 6y ago
> […] Github Pages. I'm kind of surprised the latter charges you for custom domains 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.
pmiller2 6y ago
Would your ranking change if you assumed you'd be running Jekyll and deploying to Github pages?
thitcanh 6y ago
Basically everything you wrote about GitHub Pages is wrong. 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.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Just as a clarification, much of what you mention has only changed in the last year or so. For a very long time gh-pages branch and Jekyll were assumed (you couldn't even use plugins with Jekyll). Custom domains weren't free. SSL wasn't free. Github is doing great stuff but it has taken time to evolve into the all free all you can eat buffet you see today.
  - hellojason 6y ago
    I have to agree with parent. I've had a custom domain without Jekyll on GitHub pages for well over 5 years now, and it's been free the entire time.
    - heyoni 6y ago
      Same here. Not sure where they’re getting that from. Possibly region specific?
      - singhrac 6y ago
        I replied upthread, but I made a mistake reading https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/about-custom-domains-and-github-pages https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/... when revisiting what I remembered, and I was just looking at it from the perspective of private repos. My bad!
        hellojason 6y ago
        Oh right, good point. The repo had to be public until very recently.
mygo 6y ago
Re: Github Pages - 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
justinclift 6y ago
One pretty huge downside for GitHub Pages, is that they still don't seem to serve content to IPv6 addresses. Saying that because I tried it out again a few weeks ago for a friend's website (https://neasair.org 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.
villgax 6y ago
Get your facts straight, they have had custom domains for a looong time & there was absolutely no need for Jekyll either at any point to host a page, it just happened to be one the most documented/blogged about way to use GitHub pages with automatic builds instead of having static content.
stevage 6y ago
>Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying. 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.
CSharpRon 6y ago
I used to host my site on GitHub but switched to Gitlab pages which doesn't require a special branch or extra finesse. I love it, it's really easy for me to add new posts. 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.

florigator123 6y ago

Haven't tried Netlify or Cloudfare pages, but I use GH pages for my personal blog (running Jekyll) and I've never seen any reason to switch. You need to know how to use Git and Github, but since you're reading HN you probably know these things. It's really convenient to be able to just push to GH and have it auto-deploy - and it's free. 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.

foobar33333 6y ago

gitlab pages is better imo. You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files.

gala8y 6y ago
Also, GitLab allows business websites in GitLab pages in free tier, as opposed to Netlify and Github. "With GitLab Pages, you can publish static websites directly from a repository in GitLab. Use for any personal or business website."
- lostmsu 6y ago
  GitHub allows business websites, AFAIK. Where did you get the notion, that it does not?
  - bombcar 6y ago
    https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#guidelines-for-using-github-pages https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/... "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)." Now one could read that as "don't build a SaaS on top of GitHub Pages", but you could also read that as "don't have business websites on GitHub Pages".
    - shhsshs 6y ago
      That wording specifically disallows both commercial sites and SaaS, so it should be read as both "don't build a SaaS on top of GitHub Pages" and "don't have business websites on GitHub Pages"
lights0123 6y ago
> You can use the CI to run any code you want to build the static files. That is Netlify and Cloudflare Pages' defining feature, and GitHub has had that for a few years now.
jedbrown 6y ago
Notably, it's easy to make a review site that integrates with a merge request so you can see it before deploying and get visual reviews any time you have multiple stakeholders. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/

ignoramous 6y ago

I use both pages.dev and netlify.com: pages.dev, even in open beta, is a fantastic product if it suits all your needs, but the limitations [0], if you hit them, are a dead-end and there are no ETAs as to when some of those limitations would be addressed. 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 https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites

benatkin 6y ago
How do you know that Netlify is production ready? I found Netlify Identity to not be production ready* and now I'm not so sure about the rest of the platform. * 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/117 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.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > How do you know that Netlify is production ready? I meant in a way that pages.dev is in "open beta" and netlify.com don't market themselves as such. Besides, in my personal experience, I never hit any issue with netlify that didn't have a solution.
no_wizard 6y ago
There is a strong chance that when Pages comes out of beta, Worker Sites is going to be transitioned into Pages, at least thats kind of how I feel about some of the verbiage on this page: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/migrations/migrating-from-workers https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/migrations/migrating...

pydry 6y ago

The feature that made me change from github pages to netlify was 302s. Cloudflare pages doesn't seem to have that.

avianlyric 6y ago
You need to use Cloudflare page rules, which has some limits, but works fine for www. redirects etc. For everything else it expects your SPA to handle it.
eastdakota 6y ago
Stay tuned. Lots of these Cloudflare Page niddles getting fixed in a few weeks.
TurkishPoptart 6y ago
What is 302s?
- detaro 6y ago
  (temporary) redirects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302

jacobp100 6y ago

I actually just went the other way. I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures, and the page would not work sometimes in Safari with default settings. 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 https://github.com/jacobp100/jacob-does-code - there's also a blog post about how the build system works.

londons_explore 6y ago
Usually when I need static site hosting, I don't want to build myself a great setup - I want to click a few buttons and have a great setup. 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...
bombcar 6y ago
Safari + IPv6 = find out a lot about crosswalks and stoplights.
sedachv 6y ago
> I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures 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."
- Jamie9912 6y ago
  This is something that is configurable though. If you leave your Firewall security mode to default, then yes it will block IPs with bad rep. If I don't care about anti-ddos, I just set the Firewall security to Low, and create a Firewall rule to allow everything from 0.0.0.0/0, simple as that.

singhrac 6y ago

I should warn that bike shedding about this distinction is absolutely not worth your time if you’re reading this and have less than like 100 blog posts written or are running a business on these sites (in which case I think you should pick Netlify). Go write something.

ipaddr 6y ago
Now you have something to write about.
- ric2b 6y ago
  Yup, it's almost a joke at this point, that the first post on a technical blog is usually about how they build their static blog.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
And also, who cares it's a static host and you can change to another one in an afternoon. There's zero lock-in when you're only rsyncing some files around. Just make sure you have total control over your DNS (buy a domain, put it on a good DNS host) and you really can't screw things up too badly.
- jefftime 6y ago
  Who would you consider good DNS hosts? I'm looking at setting up a static site and am new to the whole process
  - miloignis 6y ago
    Gandi.net is my favorite - their motto is "No BS" and I've found that to be true.
    - mssundaram 6y ago
      I've used Gandi.net for the past 18 years and can agree

MaulingMonkey 6y ago

> Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying. You can configure github projects to source from a different branch (including your main/master branch if you check in build artifacts directly)

anothernewdude 6y ago

Cloudflare wouldn't work well for me. Filling a captcha everytime to have a page load is stupid.

eyelidlessness 6y ago
I know what I do to get that prompt (ahem porn), I can’t imagine what does it on every page load.
- bombcar 6y ago
  IPv6 and aggressive anti third party cookies seem to trigger it pretty well.

Arkanosis 6y ago

> […] Github Pages. I'm kind of surprised the latter charges you for custom domains 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.

pmiller2 6y ago

Would your ranking change if you assumed you'd be running Jekyll and deploying to Github pages?

thitcanh 6y ago

Basically everything you wrote about GitHub Pages is wrong. 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.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Just as a clarification, much of what you mention has only changed in the last year or so. For a very long time gh-pages branch and Jekyll were assumed (you couldn't even use plugins with Jekyll). Custom domains weren't free. SSL wasn't free. Github is doing great stuff but it has taken time to evolve into the all free all you can eat buffet you see today.
- hellojason 6y ago
  I have to agree with parent. I've had a custom domain without Jekyll on GitHub pages for well over 5 years now, and it's been free the entire time.
  - heyoni 6y ago
    Same here. Not sure where they’re getting that from. Possibly region specific?
    - singhrac 6y ago
      I replied upthread, but I made a mistake reading https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/about-custom-domains-and-github-pages https://docs.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/... when revisiting what I remembered, and I was just looking at it from the perspective of private repos. My bad!
      - hellojason 6y ago
        Oh right, good point. The repo had to be public until very recently.

mygo 6y ago

Re: Github Pages - 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

justinclift 6y ago

One pretty huge downside for GitHub Pages, is that they still don't seem to serve content to IPv6 addresses. Saying that because I tried it out again a few weeks ago for a friend's website (https://neasair.org 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.

villgax 6y ago

Get your facts straight, they have had custom domains for a looong time & there was absolutely no need for Jekyll either at any point to host a page, it just happened to be one the most documented/blogged about way to use GitHub pages with automatic builds instead of having static content.

stevage 6y ago

>Github pages is fine, but the extra gh-pages branch is kind of annoying. 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.

CSharpRon 6y ago

I used to host my site on GitHub but switched to Gitlab pages which doesn't require a special branch or extra finesse. I love it, it's really easy for me to add new posts. 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.