Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website? Must haves: Be able to display a message on the landing page
Nice to haves: A Folder to keep articles I know Strikingly has a cheap ($12?) website building tool, but. It just seems wrong that I can't just buy a domain and get some random content on it without having Go Daddy charge me $5/month to host it? I apologize in advance for the noobness, but this is a serious question ;). Hope everyone is well. |
https://findingmyhtmlgoddess.com
git: https://github.com/jonascript/htmlgoddess
It generates static HTML pages that are as simple as can be. If you setup a git account, it will cover the hosting for free. A domain typically costs $12 a year.
Time isn't free, we have a lot of backend developers use https://versoly.com/ as they don't want to focus on design and actually want a good looking website quickly.
[1]: https://smocker.dev/
You can generate your own static site with Hugo / Jekyll / Frankenstein's ___.sh then upload somewhere (including github)
You can go S3 static pages : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/EnableWebsit...
(I think backblaze has a cheaper API-compatible S3 clone,)
You can go the VPS way, Vultr being amongst the cheapest (Monthly $3.5 IPv4 / $2.5 IPv6 only)
Or you can go semi managed hosting, with nearlyfreespeech starting at $1.74 per month for static sites if you host DNS with them.
There's plenty that will be free or low cost initially, but it may be a matter of time before the deal changes, they're acquired & shutdown, or they go out of business.
Buy a domain, point at your free site.
* Google Firebase hosting * Static site generator
Example: https://notes.tomgoren.com/how-this-blog-is-hosted.html
Github pages Surge.sh Render.com Gitlab pages Netlify Vercel
If you are comfortable with the CLI Hugo/Firebase hosting is a good combination
I have spoke to a lot of founders, marketers and developers who struggled to use the platform.
* Corrected mistake, was 10GB
stages:
- deploy
- clear-cache
pages:
stage: deploy
script:
- mkdir .public
- cp -r * .public
- mv .public public
artifacts:
paths:
- public
only:
- master
clear-cache:
stage: clear-cache
script:
- curl -X DELETE "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$CF_ZONE_ID/purge_cache" -H "X-Auth-Key:$CF_AUTH_KEY" -H "X-Auth-Email:$CF_AUTH_EMAIL" -H "Content-Type:application/json" --data '{"purge_everything":true}'
only:
- masterI followed the tutorial at [0] and had my site [1] running in an afternoon, as promised in the tutorial. The slowest thing was figuring out how to get my (paid-for) custom domain to point at GitHub (although a custom domain isn't essential to get your site running). I've had my site active since May 2018 with essentially zero hassle.
Pleasingly, you don't need to know anything about the version control aspects of Git to publish a site or add new blog pages and then edit them.
>> Must haves: Be able to display a message on the landing page Nice to haves: A Folder to keep articles
Yes to both of your must haves
There's also NearlyFreeSpeech[^1] which is very cheap and very free speech oriented.
They have a nice estimator https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/estimate
In order to host any web page requires a machine to serve up the web content and that machine needs to be running 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
So at a minimum, running that machine requires a safe place to house it, electricity to run it and people to keep an eye on it just to make sure it is still running.
All of those tasks cost money.
My process is:
- blog in markdown
- add a commit
- push repo // This builds on Netlify
The new content is live within minutes. I have also used Netlify to host a static html landing page that I wrote and styled by hand. I would highly recommend their service. Again, my only (monetary) cost is $12 per year via Google Domains.
Some domains I have been looking for seems cheaper than usual.
Managed Wordpress hosting is $4-$6/m from a reputable place[1], and then everything wordpress and below needs no maintenance. Youll have access control for which team members can control what, and there's probably more wordpress expertise out there than any other platform. The amount of good plugins out there minimize reinventing wheels.
Pretty much the same deal, I used it for a while and it worked well. You can connected to a github repo too, so it deploys when you push.
Even manual deployment to Netlify is enough for most needs. Just drag the public folder in and you're done. It's an automagical experience.
I am actually in process of moving to Hugo/Netlify, and if I come close to bandwidth or storage caps I hope B2/Cloudfare has implemented official solutions by then. I'd personally love to avoid s3.
For domains: Take a couple hours to find the cheapest ones available but you can get a free sub-domain as-well which is the cheapest available. I do NOT recommend Freenom ones users always had issues with them. However I do recommend eu.org[1]. You can get a sub domain like (4-letters and more).eu.org or anything.(on of their subdomains).eu.org. For example I have two: asvvvad.eu.org and vvv.int.eu.org.
For DNS forwarding (A/AAAA/CNAME/TXT records ect): I started with Namecheaps FreeDNS but switched recently to 1984hosting.com's free DNS service I used the former for quite a while and didn't have many problems with it just set it up and forgot about it but using 1984hosting's feels better and easier specially the interface
1984hosting also have a hosting plan that include free .com domain. It only have yearly payments which is $109 for a year and $129 for renewal which is less than $10 a month. That's pretty cheap for an unlimited hosting with a .com domain included I guess
[0]: https://www.heliohost.org/ [1]: https://nic.eu.org/ [2]: https://1984hosting.com/buy/hosting/
If I didn't know they was notion I would have exited and went else where.
3 bucks a month and they handle scaling and all that shit for you supposedly.
It's not free but you get a way more functionality than a static site offers.
In my case I used that for two websites - one is a blog and another one is a website for auto-generating comments.
In the case of first one, I use middleman to render static HTML files and then create a container that ships nginx and the application.
For the second app, the backend that generates comments is a Node.js application. The frontend is an app created using React, compiled into static website and Node.js serves the files.
Both apps cost me less than $0.1 per month and they have some traffic, but not a lot of it.
For the first app, I've also set up a CI/CD system using Google CLoud Build. So, every time I commit a new blog article, things get updated automatically. I did not have time to migrate the second app to same approach, but it should not be hard to do.
Google Cloud Build + Google Cloud Run can help you run a large variety of technologies almost for free, but in my case I only did it for stateless apps. You could use Google Cloud Run with a database, but I have not tried it.
If you need non-manual dynamic content, 000webhost[1] has free mysql & php server for you.
If you prefer to program the server in node.js, webtask[2] has free severless node.js env for you.
If you're considering non-free solution or more control/freedom, linode[3] is my first choice. The cheapest plan is $5/mo for 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD and 1TB traffic.
It's all also free unless you want more features, and you can easily take it and host elsewhere (like S3).
1) free options: you can choose wordpress.com, blogspot, github, etc to host your website, but the drawback is you have to use their sub-domain system which is ugly, like yourwebsite.wordpress.com, another con is the backend of website lack many customization features, all in all, you host your content on other's house, what more can u ask!
Sure you can buy a domain and attach your domain to those services, its up to you.
2) A much cheaper and regular way to host a website is choose a hosting company like Namecheap, Godaddy (not recommend though), you can lower your cost to less than $20 first year, with a domain + shared hosting.
3) you can still choose static site generator like Hugo, Jekeyll, netilify, etc, but the concept is same, you either host your content for free on their domains, or buy yourself a lovely domain to start with.
The hosting is still free. All you pay for is the domain name.
I have set this up for other people for a few bucks because doing the CNAME stuff is a bit of a pain. But once it is set up, you're set. It's a one time thing.
For less static websites, I'd recommend signing up for free tier GCP. They give you a (very small) VM for free. I've had no problem running several docker containers backing my personal sites. To be fair, they don't really have much traffic, but for the < 10 people that use my stuff, it has worked out great.
The GitLab CI is really nice, and I'd recommend it even if you don't go for Pages or GCP. It's pretty simple to set it up to automatically build images (using its personal container registry) and deploy them for you.
With this setup, the only things I pay for are domain names which I use to add SSL via let's encrypt and HAProxy (which also does some routing for me).
Hope this helps give someone some ideas.
It's just a git repo you can clone, so you own your site (it's not a service or a static site generator). It uses Lektor to generate pages (just because that's what I use, though I'm eyeing Zola as a good alternative), and it supports deploying to Gitlab Pages and Neocities with its CI config. You can also push the site to IPFS with one command (ipfs add -r pages/).
It's also trivial to host on Netlify if you want (just add the repo there). All these services I mention are excellent, but slightly different. Neocities is more of a quirky/indie website community, for example, which I love.
For static sites you can emulate this workflow fairly cheaply, from github-pages, to serving with aws s3, or simmilar (I have an abandoned blog on s3 and pay ~cents a month, but I never fully grokked aws pricing)
If you need people that wouldn't edit text/markdown/html directly, there are even git-based cms, that can abstract away the dev-friendly 'edit text, commit, push to repo' to more user friendly 'login somewhere and click a button to change content'.
The electricity used may not be cheaper than paying someone else a few bucks to host it from their data center.
Price $0.
Around $12 annually to buy a domain name if you like (if you are not happy with one that the DDNS service will give you).
When you start getting traffic, you may want to consider AWS, starting at the free tier and going up.
V-Server from https://netcup.de ca. 3$/month
.space domain ca. 2$/year from https://gandi.net
(I am not affiliated with any of them)
I wanted to a little bit more e.g. having my own calendar, and hosting my own Mercurial server (since almost nobody supports that anymore, maybe GitLab in the future). Found than out that this offer is good enough for my own VPN and even having my own tiny cloud storage.
They're just a small team of good people in Portland Oregon running an efficient smart operation. This is their parent company: https://toplevel.design/
Whenever I've had a customer service question, they reply immediately and helpfully.
I try to support businesses like this whenever possible.
Updated to fix a tpyo in number.
If you are looking for domain deals, domcomp.com/ is invaluable.