Show HN: Statichost.eu – privacy-first static site hosting

Show HN: Statichost.eu – privacy-first static site hosting(statichost.eu)

11 points by ericselin 2 years ago | 4 comments

Excited to announce StaticHost.eu - a privacy-first static site hosting service! No logging whatsoever apart from usage metrics, and hosted on Hetzner who own and operate their own data centers.

Based on the git workflow where updates trigger a clone-build-deploy-publish. Other notable characteristics:

- Clones from any git repository, even a folder on an SSH box

- Can use any Docker image to perform the site generation (i.e. build)

The classic story of something I built for myself that eventually became a something more. Still not ready, but when is such a thing ever ready...

Feedback and questions extremely welcome! :)

ValtteriL 2 years ago |

Grattis for launching! The site looks nice and clear.

While I like the privacy part and use static hosting myself, I don't think mixing them makes for good value proposition. Nor do I think those prices will alone make for a viable business you can quit your day job for.

I might not be your target market though and you might have some other goal in mind :)

Lycka till!

pestaa 2 years ago |

Nice, simple service! Well done shipping.

How do you solve for high availability? I wish hetzner would have S3-compatible object storage. Static files off of a running server gives me this weird vibe - although I should know better! It was all fine before the cloud.

It's a tough market, wish you luck!

ericselin 2 years ago | |

Thank you! Simple is indeed one of the goals.

Currently, a particular site exists as static files on one specific server, with some failover mechanisms in place. So mainly availability is achieved by having enough server resources and having a minimum amount of moving parts :)

The tricky thing to solve for with HA is TLS termination. It is probably the most complicated thing (and for sure the most computationally intense thing) a static HTTP server does. I haven't done any testing, but my hypothesis is that TLS termination is what will start failing first. Barring DNS-based tactics (mitigation, not cure, in my opinion) you just have to accept that this is your single point of failure.

But a great question! Keeping our sites online is of course something we're working on all the time.

And yes, it was all fine before the cloud! Alas, a single server was (much?) more stable in the early days than a single instance/node/pod is today...

AndrianV 2 years ago |

Why is better than for example https://static.app/ or netlify?