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Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009. I think the in

• adriangrigore 4y ago
  Shell is what I use to generate my sites also https://mkws.sh https://mkws.sh! Very simple, very eficient!
• alberth 4y ago
  Dreamhost is hugely underrated. Their custom panel with deep integrations are phenomenal for side projects or small businesses. In under a minute you can have your web server, SSL cert, database and more all setup and working - and you don’t have to manage any of it. I wish more companies offered their level of managed services. (If anyone knows of others, I’d like to hear who)
  • dragontamer 4y ago
    Is there anything really wrong with a CPanel host with FTP upload? Namecheap, Dreamhost, GoDaddy even (well maybe not them lol). There are a billion shared hosts everywhere and CPanel really isn't hard to use for HTTPS enabling or getting FTP locations to work with. ------ Bonus points: shove a random .php file in there and it probably will work if you need just a little bit of dynamic content.
    • alberth 4y ago
      There’s a massive difference in quality and ease of use between cPanel and dreamhost custom panel. I’ve been a customer since 2004
      • dragontamer 4y ago
        Well, I'm sure that's true. But I guess my overall point is that CPanel is way easier than anything the original poster / author wrote.
    • Dalewyn 4y ago
      >Is there anything really wrong with a CPanel host with FTP upload? Nothing, other than that it's not cool with the kids because it's the grandpa's way of being a webmaster. Personally, being an old school grump, I'll choose FTP upload over Git nonsense any day of the week because why in the nine seas of the seven hells do I need to sign up for Github, upload all my crap there, download-install and run a Git daemon, feed it my Github login credentials, let the daemon download and sync/compile/whatever the code I have there, and then probably run the whole contraption through sixty dozen frameworks of JavaShit to have a website? I'll just fire up Filezilla or whatever is the trendy FTP client nowadays, punch in my login creds, upload my crap that I wrote up in Notepad++, maybe have some fun with PHP because I'm old school, and be done with it. :V
      • pdimitar 4y ago
        You over-focus on what's cool or fashionable. For many of us that's absolutely not the reason to go (or not to go) with a platform. GIT is extremely useful for versioning. I want that. If I make a dumb mistake I want to have a diff that I've fixed a typo / grammar / added more links etc. You neither need to use GitHub nor give your GitHub credentials to anything. You can just make a public repo and have it cloned / pulled-from by literally anyone interested -- why would anyone clone your public blog repo and re-host it? You can use sr.ht, Codeberg or just host your own GIT -- it's not that hard if you're into it (I am not). Your way of doing it is fine but let's not pretend that everyone else is following fashion or coolness. That's very rarely true. There's a list of very good reasons to use a public GIT repo + Netlify + use a static site generator on your own machine to only produce a directory of HTML+CSS files.
  • chubot 4y ago
    FWIW I also tried NearlyFreeSpeech, which is the top comment in the same thread I linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253277 I think it is good, and will solve people's static hosting problem. It's a server that you don't have to manage. It has a nice fast custom web interface. Except I didn't realize it was FreeBSD. That probably doesn't matter for most, but I'm used to Linux, so I like Dreamhost better. Also I feel like they are using some kind of slower NFS disk, whereas Dreamhost feels like a bare metal disk mostly. ----- I was trying to find another thread here, where someone remarked that "shared hosting" got a bad reputation in the early days due to janky control panels and bad/aggressive marketing. Also a lot of the companies seem to have gotten acquired in the early 2000's, i.e. they changed hands a lot. But again I've been using Dreamhost since 2009 and it's been great. No complaints except the typical thing everyone does of raising the domain name pricing after a year (the advertised price is the "first year discount"). They have not raised the hosting fees. (You might save $3 per year using a domain name purchased elsewhere, but that doesn't seem worth the hassle to me.) So I thought there were many other shared hosting companies, but maybe not? Maybe they all got caught up in acquisitions and then the service declined? (That's exactly what's going to happen with the free cloud services you're all using now BTW, so that's why I stick with something older and proven.) I have used 1and1 in the early 2000's, but I remember it being very janky and weird, and Dreamhost is a lot better technically. They seem to have more competent system administration. ---- FWIW here is a thread with some competitors: https://lobste.rs/s/jkutwc/recommendations_for_shared_hosting_with https://lobste.rs/s/jkutwc/recommendations_for_shared_hostin... Honestly I wonder if Dreamhost is more unique now than it used to be? I thought of it as "commodity shared hosting" -- i.e. a Linux OS and a web server. But I think that actually being able to manage that competently is a dying art :-/ Other threads I bookmarked while looking for shared hosting that supports FastCGI (dynamic sites, not static, and not PHP!): bluehost: https://www.bluehost.com/help/article/fastcgi-for-php https://www.bluehost.com/help/article/fastcgi-for-php hostgator: https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/does-hostgator-support-fastcgi https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/does-hostgator-suppor... I'd be interested to know if those companies are comparable to dreamhost!
    • kej 4y ago
      As a long time (but very light) Nearly Free Speech user who is also more used to Linux, I'm curious if you ran into specific problems because of them using FreeBSD, or if it was just the general feeling of things being slightly different than you're used to (which is totally a valid reason to prefer something else, I'm just wondering if it was more than that)?
  • trinovantes 4y ago
    I think this is what Cloudflare Pages tries to solve You just connect your git repo and tell it what command to run to build your site and where the html output is
    • alberth 4y ago
      I really love Pages but for simple apps that are just PHP and MySQL - Pages doesn’t support that.
      • Syeposxr 4y ago
        Well in that case it's not a static site any more.
  • js4ever 4y ago
    Please check https://elest.io https://elest.io You can deploy WordPress, Ghost, Magento and 185 fully managed software. You get a dedicated VM with stellar performances, SSL, smtp, security, borg ans S3 backups, monitoring, logs and full root access even if it's managed. We also support CI/CD pipelines. Disclaimer: I work there ;)
• giantrobot 4y ago
  I've also been a Dreamhost customer for a long time. Note that Dreamhost's $10/mo is for I-don't-know-exactly number of domains. If you own a domain name you can add it in their dashboard, point it to their name servers, and you're up and running. Their services includes e-mail which means avoiding the perils of fully self-hosting. While you could save a few dollars renting a VPS, it's only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. If you're just going to do static hosting I've found it to be a good deal.
  • chubot 4y ago
    Yeah I think it's infinite domains ... You pay a yearly fee for each domain, which is something like $16. But the hosting is a flat fee at less than $10/month. (edit: just checked, actually I pay yearly for a discount.) So I find that to be pretty nice, because I have had 5 domains at one point. And now I have 3 or so. But I always keep the same hosting account. It works well in practice.
    • giantrobot 4y ago
      You can register your domains anywhere and point them at Dreamhost. I don't recall any fees for setting up a new domain with them so long as you already own it.
• forgotmypw17 4y ago
  Another DreamHost fan here. I host dozens of hybrid sites on both the shared hosting and VPS and the service is great. My setup is pretty simple, a Perl-based SSG which generates static HTML on-demand if it happens to be missing from the tree. I've had a few minor issues over the years, often self-inflicted, and whenever I use the support panel, I get a helpful human response within an couple of hours, usually with a resolution. If I have to respond, I can respond to the email by email! All in all, can't praise DreamHost enough.
  • pryelluw 4y ago
    Same here except with opalstack.com It’s run by the same great team that was behind webfaction before godaddy bought it.
  • alberth 4y ago
    Complete agree. Been DH customer since 2004. Just wish they used newer hardware than they do on their VPS & Dedicated offering.
    • forgotmypw17 4y ago
      I have no idea what kind of hardware they use for VPS, but whatever thing I'm doing, they've handled it well. Haven't tried Dedicated yet.
  • bzxcvbn 4y ago
    What you're describing is a caching system, not a static site generation system.
    • forgotmypw17 4y ago
      It's both, and can run in several different modes. In dynamic mode, you are correct that the HTML files act as a cache. In static mode, the on-demand layer (and any related hooks in the web server) are turned off, with all the pages being pre-generated. There is also a hybrid mode, where the access log (and content store) is scraped for updates and they're integrated into the static HTML on a schedule. Each of these has its own advantages and drawbacks in terms of security, accessibility, performance, and convenience.
• _hcuq 4y ago
  Yep. Been on Dreamhost since 2004. Just create the html file and sftp it using FileZilla. Setting up a domain is just a few clicks on their admin site. PHP + MySQL works perfectly. All for $10/month.
• nine_k 4y ago
  Nothing's wrong, it just gives much more than needed to serve a static site! I like the idea to statically pre-generate entire HTTP responses, with all headers, and just serve a byte stream mindlessly once a URL is mapped. If TLS is handled by a separate proxy (that only does TLS termination), the "web server" becomes as trivial as it gets. Fast, simple, due to the simplicity probably bulletproof.
  • chubot 4y ago
    I don't really follow what you're saying It serves static sites. I upload my files with rsync, scp, or git, and they are served
    • Groxx 4y ago
      There's still a "web server" in front of those files that speaks HTTP and delivers those files. An extremely simple one, but it still exists. What they're proposing is cutting out the "speaks HTTP" part in favor of entirely pre-recorded responses. Whether you think that's feasible or not depends on where you draw the line in the sand, but it can certainly be easier to implement than nginx.
      • bathtub365 4y ago
        Web servers exist already. Does what you’re describing exist?
        • ciprian_craciun 4y ago
          [the author here] Well, the article does point in the last section "Putting it in practice" to my own implementation <https://github.com/volution/kawipiko https://github.com/volution/kawipiko>. :)
• laundermaf 4y ago
  > what's wrong with shared hosting? You answered that yourself: > It costs less than $10/month That’s a lot of dollars for a static website. There are a myriad of free options and there have been for years. Kinda disappointing that they weren’t mentioned. Anyone wanting to deploy a static website knows the big 4, completely free: Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, GitHub Pages.
  • chubot 4y ago
    I prefer not to use free services because they're not sustainable, and they usually come with strings attached Remember I've been using this for 13 years, and if it keeps on working the same way, I'll use it for another 13 easily. (I've hosted multiple sites on it over the years) The current page claims it's $3.95 a month if you pay yearly: https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/shared/ https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/shared/ I thought mine was more like $8 but I honestly don't remember. It's a fair price for steady service IMO
    • laundermaf 4y ago
      It’s static hosting. If they change their terms, it couldn’t be any easier to switch. I switched most of my Netlify sites to CloudFlare Pages in like 10 clicks each. The whole point of having a static file is that they’re super easy to manage. Worst case scenario you pay a few cents to host on S3 and stick any free-range CDN on it. I categorically refuse to use any non-static hosting for static content. Your shared hosting runs code and can be compromised, especially if you host multiple software/sites on it.
    • bachmeier 4y ago
      > I prefer not to use free services because they're not sustainable Just a guess from outside, but Microsoft is likely to be sustainable even if you use GitHub Pages to serve your static site on a free account.
      • chubot 4y ago
        When I say "sustainable", I don't just mean that the company might not have enough money to keep its lights on It's more that some product manager or VP will notice this free service and want to attach their strings to it. Having worked in big tech, it happens very often. Google Groups is a famous example at Google (among many). It was way better 15 years ago, but it just wasn't "worth it" to keep the lights on in its current state, so it shuffled through a series of product managers/teams who wanted to "improve" it. Microsoft has a long history of this as well. I feel like this is another generational thing -- people forgot what Microsoft used to be like, and how their free products turned hostile. So far Github is OK, but I'm sure glad there are alternatives. I prefer to just pay money to a company that provides a service, and I hope they profit from that. That incentives should be aligned. So far with Dreamhost that has worked out exactly as expected. If I had spent any time migrating to the latest and greatest thing in the last 13 years, that would have easily burned the money I have saved by using a free service. e.g. I have hosted sites on other platforms that are now down and useless, as I'm sure many others here have.
• rsolva 4y ago
  Ten dollars sounds a bit expensive for shared hosting? I have been happy with Hawkhost for the last 10 years, which starts their shared hosting options at $2.99/month. That is 10 GB storage, unlimited bandwidth, host as many domains as you want, SSH access, choose between servers in EU or America. I even use it for some email addresses. I have great respect for the folks keeping this stable and working for decades for such a low price!
• ciprian_craciun 4y ago
  [the author here] Indeed didn't mention anything about the shared webhosting solutions, just as I didn't mention anything about S3 + CloudFront, or Backblaze B2 + a CDN in front, or Cloudflare + WebWorkers, or AWS Lambda, or any other thousand ways to do it... (Like for example there is <https://redbean.dev/ https://redbean.dev/> which I find just so intriguing, and not far from my own <https://github.com/volution/kawipiko https://github.com/volution/kawipiko> proposal.) Although shared webhosting is part of our web history -- and still a viable choice especially if you have something in PHP or something that requires a little-bit of dynamic content -- I don't think it's still a common choice for today. It's somewhere in between dedicated cloud-hosting, because although you have an actual HTTP server (usually Apache or Nginx) that you can't configure it much because it's managed by the provider, thus it gives you the same features (and limitations) as an a proper cloud-hosted static site solution (such as Netlify); and between self-hosting because of the same reasons, having an actual full-blown HTTP server, but one you can't fully control, thus it gives you fewer features than a self-managed VM in a cloud provider or self-hosted machine. Thus unless you need PHP, or `htaccess`, I think the other two alternatives make a better choice. The issue with "static sites", due to the de-facto requirements in 2022 imposed by the the internet "gatekeepers" (mainly search engines), is that they aren't "just a bunch of files on disk that we can just serve with proper `Content-Type`, `Last-Modified` or `ETag`, and perhaps compressed"; we now need (in order to meet the latest hoops the gatekeepers want us to jump through) to also do a bunch of things that aren't quite possible (or certainly not easily) with current web servers. For example: * minification (which I've cited in my article) -- besides compression, one should also employ HTML / CSS / JS and other asset minification; none of the classical web servers support this; there is something like <https://www.modpagespeed.com/ https://www.modpagespeed.com/>, but it's far from straightforward to deploy (let alone on a shared web-host;) * when it comes to headers (be it the ones for CSP and other security related ones) or even `Link` headers for preloading, these aren't easy to configure, especially if you need those `Link` headers only for some HTML pages and not all resources; in this regard I don't know how many shared webhosts actually allow you to tinker with these; The point I was trying to make is that if you want to deploy a professional (as in performant) static web site, just throwing some files in a folder and pointing Apache or Nginx at them isn't enough. If the performance you are getting by default from such a setup is enough for you, then perfect! If not there is a lot of pain getting everything to work properly.