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IMO this seems like a good use case for Wix, SquareSpace, etc. If you absolutely must do it yourself, cheap and reliable hosts are nearlyfreespeech.net and Ver

IMO this seems like a good use case for Wix, SquareSpace, etc. If you absolutely must do it yourself, cheap and reliable hosts are nearlyfreespeech.net and Vercel.com. Both can take care of domain registrations too. Vercel is more modern and easier to use; it's designed for modern Jamstacks but you can host regular HTML on it too, and it has a built-in CDN. Nearlyfreespeech has been around a long time and offers old-school barebones hosting, much cheaper than a full-blown VM. And you can put free Cloudflare on top of it to cache/CDN/HTTPS it. Cloudflare Pages is also another static option, but it's not as easy to use as Vercel. Github Pages is yet another (free but janky) option; I wouldn't recommend it over the others, but if you like Microsoft more, it's there for you. All of these are much easier than managing your own VM, since they're PaaS specifically for web hosting and not just low-level VMs where you have to deal with OS updates, hosting software, and all the other pains. You might also be eligible for the free tier of AWS, GCloud, etc., and they have certain higher-level services that can make this easier (like Google App Engine or AWS Amplify) instead of their low-level VMs. ---------------- FYI, searching for "static site hosting" these days is probably better than "website hosting". The "web hosts" typically target small/medium businesses who don't know any better, whereas the static hosts target enterprise-y JS stacks. Hosting basic HTML static files on their CDN is a side effect for them, like a loss leader, so basically you take advantage of their cheap dev/test plans and never need to upgrade to their full enterprise setups.

cpach 3y ago
First para: Totally agree. I’m also a bit surprised that I so rarely see any shoutouts to AWS Amplify. I use it to host some Hugo sites and it’s incredibly convenient. Just put your site in a private (or public) GitHub repo, connect Amplify and there you go. (Manual DNS configuration not needed for those who use Route 53.) Couldn’t be simpler.
- solardev 3y ago
  Opinion: Amplify seems like a good service on paper, but when when I tried to use it for a project last year, I kept running into issues. Some of the documentation was incomplete or outdated, the auth layer was confusingly implemented, and some of their sample components didn't seem to work...? I couldn't tell if Amplify was still under active development or abandonware. Maybe I'm just dumb (I don't work with AWS much compared to the other clouds), but I found Vercel, Cloudflare, and Google Cloud all easier to use overall. AWS had so many layers and Amplify itself had different parts. It was hard for me to figure out exactly what I needed and to find the right documentation for it. But still, it's probably a good option for people who are already in the AWS ecosystem. If they're not, in general I think the value-added resellers (i.e. companies like Vercel who make higher-level abstractions over the big clouds) are generally more user-friendly and have a lower management surface.

cpach 3y ago

First para: Totally agree. I’m also a bit surprised that I so rarely see any shoutouts to AWS Amplify. I use it to host some Hugo sites and it’s incredibly convenient. Just put your site in a private (or public) GitHub repo, connect Amplify and there you go. (Manual DNS configuration not needed for those who use Route 53.) Couldn’t be simpler.

solardev 3y ago
Opinion: Amplify seems like a good service on paper, but when when I tried to use it for a project last year, I kept running into issues. Some of the documentation was incomplete or outdated, the auth layer was confusingly implemented, and some of their sample components didn't seem to work...? I couldn't tell if Amplify was still under active development or abandonware. Maybe I'm just dumb (I don't work with AWS much compared to the other clouds), but I found Vercel, Cloudflare, and Google Cloud all easier to use overall. AWS had so many layers and Amplify itself had different parts. It was hard for me to figure out exactly what I needed and to find the right documentation for it. But still, it's probably a good option for people who are already in the AWS ecosystem. If they're not, in general I think the value-added resellers (i.e. companies like Vercel who make higher-level abstractions over the big clouds) are generally more user-friendly and have a lower management surface.