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> 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 myri

> 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.
    - nsteel 4y ago
      I don't disagree with you but you can't use Google to support your argument. They have to be the worst player out there when it comes to supporting free services over the long-term. You're so much safer with Github's free tier, there's no comparison.
    - xigoi 4y ago
      If you use your own domain, you can easily change your hosting should it go down.
- AnonC 4y ago
  > I prefer not to use free services because they're not sustainable, and they usually come with strings attached When I checked Dreamhost several years ago, I found that it was also an oversold service that relied on most customers using way less than the promised capacity. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad at hosting websites, but it’s not something I wanted to pay for. So I hosted my websites with Nearly Free Speech (NFSN), where hosting is actually by what you consume. For small static sites, you could get a lot more mileage with NFSN and still not pay more than a couple of dollars a month. It’s a lot cheaper than your Dreamhost plan, and is truly sustainable because NFSN gets very close to recovering its costs plus a little more to sustain, grow and become better. NFSN also doesn’t have tricks like referral programs and other special discounts, unlike Dreamhost (talking from what I’ve seen about Dreamhost in the past). The major downside is it doesn’t have cPanel and fancy application installers. But that shouldn’t be an issue for people who would use scp to setup web pages on a host.
  - chubot 4y ago
    Sure, NearlyFreeSpeech is probably closer to the ideal I'm talking about, but I happen to use Dreamhost. My point was that shared hosting exists, is good, and is the right solution to this problem. My point was not that you should use Dreamhost :) I tried NearlyFreeSpeech a few years ago; some sibling comments describe my experiences
- fuglede_ 4y ago
  This had me wondering when GitHub Pages was actually introduced; earliest sign I can find is a blog post [0] from December 2008, so that's almost 14 years ago. [0] https://github.blog/2008-12-18-github-pages/ https://github.blog/2008-12-18-github-pages/
aesyondu 4y ago
Shoutout to Gitlab as well, which is what I use for personal sites.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Your domain alone is going to cost about half that, and much more for fancy domains. Depending on whether you need a site mail contact (sometimes required for abuse@yoursite.com) and certificate (for any ecommerce site), we're talking about at least twice that. We do talk about serious hosting, do we?
- watermelon0 4y ago
  Your costs are way off. .com is around ~10$/year, email server is included in practically all shared hosting, and basically every shared hosting offers free TLS via Let's Encrypt (or some other provider.)
notpushkin 4y ago
There are still some limits to these (for example Netlify limits the bandwidth you can use each month), but yeah, for most practical purposes the free tier should do just fine. On a side note, I'm wondering if one can host one site simultaneously on e. g. Netlify and Vercel and load-balance those (for example, with round-robin DNS) to stay within free limits for longer.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ciprian_craciun 4y ago
  You could also just throw a CDN in front of Netlify (I do this with Cloudflare) and it will be extremely hard to reach that limit.
prmoustache 4y ago
There are web hosting plans at less than 3$/month. There are also community hosting networks offering different kind of hosting services for a small sum / year. Here is an example of such a network mostly france based but I am sure there are same kind of initiatives all over the world: https://www.chatons.org https://www.chatons.org
l72 4y ago
Sure, that is a lot for hosting a single static site. But, that $10 essentially gives you unlimited sites, unlimited email hosting, SSL cert management, lots of storage, unlimited network, and much more…
- miragecraft 4y ago
  It's never unlimited, the terms and conditions for shared hosting are specifically designed to prohibit use cases (ex. file storage not connected with a website) that generate excessive usage. And if you somehow find a loophole you'll quickly become persona non grata. As the saying goes, TANSTAAFL.

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.
  - nsteel 4y ago
    I don't disagree with you but you can't use Google to support your argument. They have to be the worst player out there when it comes to supporting free services over the long-term. You're so much safer with Github's free tier, there's no comparison.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    If you use your own domain, you can easily change your hosting should it go down.
AnonC 4y ago
> I prefer not to use free services because they're not sustainable, and they usually come with strings attached When I checked Dreamhost several years ago, I found that it was also an oversold service that relied on most customers using way less than the promised capacity. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad at hosting websites, but it’s not something I wanted to pay for. So I hosted my websites with Nearly Free Speech (NFSN), where hosting is actually by what you consume. For small static sites, you could get a lot more mileage with NFSN and still not pay more than a couple of dollars a month. It’s a lot cheaper than your Dreamhost plan, and is truly sustainable because NFSN gets very close to recovering its costs plus a little more to sustain, grow and become better. NFSN also doesn’t have tricks like referral programs and other special discounts, unlike Dreamhost (talking from what I’ve seen about Dreamhost in the past). The major downside is it doesn’t have cPanel and fancy application installers. But that shouldn’t be an issue for people who would use scp to setup web pages on a host.
- chubot 4y ago
  Sure, NearlyFreeSpeech is probably closer to the ideal I'm talking about, but I happen to use Dreamhost. My point was that shared hosting exists, is good, and is the right solution to this problem. My point was not that you should use Dreamhost :) I tried NearlyFreeSpeech a few years ago; some sibling comments describe my experiences
fuglede_ 4y ago
This had me wondering when GitHub Pages was actually introduced; earliest sign I can find is a blog post [0] from December 2008, so that's almost 14 years ago. [0] https://github.blog/2008-12-18-github-pages/ https://github.blog/2008-12-18-github-pages/

aesyondu 4y ago

Shoutout to Gitlab as well, which is what I use for personal sites.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Your domain alone is going to cost about half that, and much more for fancy domains. Depending on whether you need a site mail contact (sometimes required for abuse@yoursite.com) and certificate (for any ecommerce site), we're talking about at least twice that. We do talk about serious hosting, do we?

watermelon0 4y ago
Your costs are way off. .com is around ~10$/year, email server is included in practically all shared hosting, and basically every shared hosting offers free TLS via Let's Encrypt (or some other provider.)

notpushkin 4y ago

There are still some limits to these (for example Netlify limits the bandwidth you can use each month), but yeah, for most practical purposes the free tier should do just fine. On a side note, I'm wondering if one can host one site simultaneously on e. g. Netlify and Vercel and load-balance those (for example, with round-robin DNS) to stay within free limits for longer.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ciprian_craciun 4y ago
You could also just throw a CDN in front of Netlify (I do this with Cloudflare) and it will be extremely hard to reach that limit.

prmoustache 4y ago

There are web hosting plans at less than 3$/month. There are also community hosting networks offering different kind of hosting services for a small sum / year. Here is an example of such a network mostly france based but I am sure there are same kind of initiatives all over the world: https://www.chatons.org https://www.chatons.org

l72 4y ago

Sure, that is a lot for hosting a single static site. But, that $10 essentially gives you unlimited sites, unlimited email hosting, SSL cert management, lots of storage, unlimited network, and much more…

miragecraft 4y ago
It's never unlimited, the terms and conditions for shared hosting are specifically designed to prohibit use cases (ex. file storage not connected with a website) that generate excessive usage. And if you somehow find a loophole you'll quickly become persona non grata. As the saying goes, TANSTAAFL.