I had a blast building hn-books (http://hn-books.com http://hn-books.com) All static. I could have deployed the app on a thumb-drive. And it had advanced searc

I had a blast building hn-books (http://hn-books.com http://hn-books.com) All static. I could have deployed the app on a thumb-drive. And it had advanced searching, a book listing and recommendation system, a fully-configurable countdown clock for your startup, and a few other things. It got to the point that whatever I could imagine, I could imagine building it as a static site. And I would prefer doing so. This is truly separating the view from the data. The same back-end services (for hn-books I didn't even have a back-end!) could plug into zillions of variously-looking front-ends. And as it turned out, the Query String was a heckuva lot more useful than I imagined when I started. Neat stuff. ADD: One more thing. If, like most folks, you have a class of data that doesn't change very often, say lookup tables or in hn-books' case the actual database, there's no reason you can't deploy that information as a static file as well. You can pull JSON just as easily from a static file somewhere as as server, and it uses a lot less resources. For my newspaper23 site, I used a combination: 4 times an hour I rebuild the database and deploy as a JSON. Then the clients all just pull from that file. When combined with a CDN this has tremendous scaling potential. And it's very simple to do. Why thrash the database every time somebody visits your site when it's just returning the same stuff?