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Ask HN: Where would you host 100 small, customizable, static sites?

7 points by ollerac ↗ HN
I want to offer dead simple website hosting for customers of my startup. Only small customizations for each page. Only one template. I'm thinking the AWS API with S3, Cloudfront, Route53, along with a custom front end, but I wanted to check here first to make sure I'm not getting in over my head.

8 comments

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lowhangingnuts
I've used https://www.netlify.com to host 100s of static sites for my clients.

It integrates nicely with GitHub and is blazing fast (distributed, geo-cached CDNs).

Best of all, the team at Netlify knows what it's doing, and founder Matt is very smart and their support responds instantly to any questions, no matter how deeply techie it is or how complex.

[ Disclaimer: I'm not affliated with Netlify. Just happen to love their service as I was looking for this and did an extensive evaluation of various such service providers]

ollerac
Thanks for responding!

Which Netlify plan do you use? I'm looking to offer this service for free.

Can your clients customize their sites? I'd want them to be able to upload a new logo or change the text on the About page, for example.

thenomad
I've recently switched to Netlify and I'm very impressed. I may well end up moving most or all of my sites there.

A great choice for OP's usecase, I think.

jlgaddis
This doesn't sound like anything a small, $5-10/month VPS couldn't handle.
ollerac
I'd like to offer clients the option to customize their sites, however. How would you go about setting that up? Would you build a CMS for multiple users on the VPS or use a prebuilt solution? I was thinking about S3 because it'd serve their sites quickly, it'd be secure, and I could build a simple front end pretty easily. What do you think?
jstewartmobile
I'd do it caveman style and self host. Keep a tiny VM of your setup on the cloud somewhere as a failover (only have to power it on long enough to rsync).

As long as things stay small, managing hardware is usually easier than addressing 3rd-party curve-balls.

tmnvix
I'm currently building something very similar.

The stack is very similar to what you're proposing:

S3, Route53, Cloudfront, with a Django backend running on Lambda (using the great Zappa! framework for this), and a very basic CMS built with React. Django and React apps rely on a Graphql implementation (Graphene + Apollo) for data transfer.

For a short while I considered using Google's cloud offering due to S3 having a 50 bucket limit but they have since dropped that limitation.

I've been jumping back and forth between the infrastructure and apps solving each problem only when necessary but would be happy to share what little experience I have with you.

You can PM me if you like: mail[at]woven.website

cdvonstinkpot
FastMail accounts come with ftp/webdav storage & an interface for turning a directory into a static site. Fast backend, reseller accounts, DNS, etc. No complaints.