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Ask HN: What is the cheapest way to make a website?

125 points by protabot ↗ HN
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.

98 comments

[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] thread
abana
I am not sure I fully understood you. Do you want to have a static site without the hassle of having to host it with Go Daddy?
mattcdrake
I registered my domain via Google Domains for $12. I write content in markdown and use a static site generator called Hugo to turn it into html. I host it on Netlify for free.

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.

mortivore
I do the same, but with Gatsby.js, and Namecheap.
juangacovas
You can get cheaper domains, i.e. Porkbun.com is running a 3 per user $4.15 for .com (just looked, I'm happy with them)
shrutipathak
I had no idea about Porkbun.com. Thanks for that.

Some domains I have been looking for seems cheaper than usual.

Ayesh
As someone who moved entire 20+ domains to porkbun, I can assure you they are a pretty good company. Certainly not a giant, but I never had problems. They are the only few companies that allow https:// domain redirection, email forwarding, and yet provide good prices for domains too.

Updated to fix a tpyo in number.

wenc
I'm sure 0+ was a typo :) ... but porkbun.com sounds interesting. I've been on GoDaddy for years but their UI and marketing is so spammy that a minimalist alternative would be a nice change. Thanks.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
sivers
I moved all (30+) of my domains to Porkbun a couple years ago, and have referred all of my friends there since. Everyone has been really happy with their service.

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.

Kye
I don't like the idea of companies being able to own the TLD for a concept they had no part in creating, particularly .gay, but at least it seems to be in good hands.
arkitaip
Porkbun isn't just the cheapest registrar most of the time, they are legit and very trustworthy. Moved most of my domains a couple of years ago and it just works.

If you are looking for domain deals, domcomp.com/ is invaluable.

jklein11
Github pages is pretty much free. You can buy a domain name for ~$10 a year
bachmeier
Not only that, but you don't have to know anything about Git to get it going. You can upload files directly to your repo using the web interface and do the minor editing of the config file (for say choosing a theme) in the browser. I don't know if anyone has written this up. It really is simple enough that absolutely anyone can do it.
iamunr
Type words in a file, run it on vercel, you have free mysite.now.sh

Buy a domain, point at your free site.

orisho
GitHub pages / GitLab pages. I prefer the latter since the CI for pages is less magical and more flexible as a result - you aren't limited to what they support, and they don't claim a 100GB* traffic limit (just fair use). Couple with a cheap .com and free Cloudflare for DNS and caching.

* Corrected mistake, was 10GB

orisho
This is my entire CI yaml, which copies static HTML and other files (I don't use any static site generator, just plain HTML & CSS) and flushes the Cloudflare cache:

  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:
     - master
KineticLensman
Yes.

I 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

[0] http://jmcglone.com/guides/github-pages/

[1] https://www.non-kinetic-effects.co.uk/

IanCal
I'd recommend Hugo or similar plus netlify. It's incredibly easy to get a static (or mostly static) page up and available. Use someone else's template, then you can deal with everything with drag & drop if you want.

It's all also free unless you want more features, and you can easily take it and host elsewhere (like S3).

imsd
Notion can be used to create simple websites. You can then find an online tutorial to use Notion with a custom domain. Other than the cost of the domain, this method is entirely free.
volkandkaya
The notion websites I have used have been very slow loading.

If I didn't know they was notion I would have exited and went else where.

[dead] nohorse
Notion. Make a page in markdown and share it with a public link. Free for personal use.
bilal4hmed
Hugo + Gitlab CI/CD to push in to Google Firebase. I use namesilo for domain hosting at $12 / yr. I'm well under the free quota offered by GCP
vorpalhex
In addition to the Gitlab/Github options, AWS S3 by itself is fairly decent and a few pennies. You can front it by cloudfront for more money if you need a global CDN.

There's also NearlyFreeSpeech[^1] which is very cheap and very free speech oriented.

[^1]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

dexterdog
But with s3/cf if you get hugged by something like hn you're going to be in for a hefty bandwidth bill.
vorpalhex
HTML and CSS are real tiny. Don't include the kitchen sink if you can't afford sending it across the wire.
jussij
> 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?

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.

dmortin
Heroku, Netlify, AppEngine, Firebase, etc. lots of possibilities to host a personal site completely free.
richardw
Serving from S3 with Cloudflare adds tiny marginal cost to both of those companies. I moved a few static sites to that setup. Cost is in compute, storage, etc. not hosting static pages.
dmortin
For static sites Firebase is quite good. You get a global CDN by default and the free plan is enough for most personal purposes.
earthboundkid
I'm hosting a website with 300K pageviews/month for free (-ish: I'm paying for form collection but not bandwidth) on Netlify.
StavrosK
Funny you should ask, I made just the thing for you the other day:

https://quicksite.stavros.io/

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.

indigodaddy
I likes. Suggestions on how to integrate comments into it?
StavrosK
I use commento, but generally find comments a bit useless.
icey
GitHub + Netlify makes a really nice combo as well, since Netlify helps with simple form handling (and a bunch of other niceties)
skcode
It really is the nicest combo for any kind of simple site that is either static/calls APIs. Also when paired with something like gatsby can make a full blown CMS/blog-like site with minimal setup
ken
Do you have an old computer at home, and an internet connection? You can always host it yourself.

The electricity used may not be cheaper than paying someone else a few bucks to host it from their data center.

ganstyles
I don't think this would work. How would one get around the ISP's NAT to expose your address to the wider internet? At least, without potentially paying the ISP extra or going through a (relatively) lot of trouble to monitor/manage where your DNS is pointing. If I am way off base on this, please elucidate.
StavrosK
Not all ISPs have NATs, I guess.
BenjiWiebe
In the US, most don't have NATs, in my experience.
jgalentine007
Dynamic DNS has been a thing for ages and it is trivial to PAT on most any firewall you may have hooked up to a modem in bridge mode.
riazrizvi
There's a big community around self-hosting at reddit on /r/selfhosted. The sidebar has links to specifically hosting your own website.
ggrelet
OVH has a 10MB storage free plan where you can host a landing pages, images and such.
ASVVVAD
For hosting: Many options. HelioHost[0] is worth mentioning, free 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization; Vercel,Git(Lab/Hub) Pages ect

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/

h0p3
Github + Tiddlywiki. That's what I do for https://philosopher.life/. It's free (unless you rent a domain name), flexible, and easy to distribute over many kinds of channels.
StavrosK
What is your site about? I've seen it four times this week, but I haven't really figured out why it's popular.
riazrizvi
Perhaps it's about frustration with boring convention, and what that looks like when you render it into a website design?
StavrosK
Very possibly, though in this case the lack of convention doesn't help me understand what the website is about.
h0p3
I think it's fair to call it a personal site and a public self-model, though I cannot say it merits popularity. Unfortunately, I don't have a short and clean answer for what it is about (though I spend significant energy trying to answer that question). It's a place to think, a conduit to communicate with myself and others, and it's where I do philosophy. Each member of my immediate family writes in a wiki every day. We autonomously tell the stories of our lives with these devices. Some kinds of relationships and conversations require 10,000 hours, and we aim to make art of our lives together. It is my honor to speak with others through my wiki.
StavrosK
That makes sense, thank you.
galeactena
Just another option:

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.

young_hopper
I've been using GitLab pages along with its CI, and it has been really great for static sites.

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.