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Ask HN: What's your go-to webhost in 2023 for simple websites?

16 points by Michelangelo11 ↗ HN
I'm trying to put up a simple site with a few HTML and JS files, and I grabbed one of the first hosts I found, CloudFlare Pages. But even digging up the process to put up a tiny, static site like mine took some work -- there were absolutely no obvious options for it in the UI. The forum post I dug up linked to an official documentation page explaining that the only solution involved using git and pulling the files from a GH repo (link for the curious: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/deploy-anything/ )

This is obviously a much more complex and less straightforward user experience than the one I had some 20 years ago, when I used an FTP client to upload whatever I wanted by a process that was pretty obvious, took just a couple of steps, and was hard to screw up. That's exactly what I'd like to be able to do again, but I have no idea if there's a hosting service that can offer something like that today. Can anyone recommend one they've had good experiences with?

27 comments

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armchairhacker
Github pages

100% free. Very fast. If you want you can get a non-GH domain. Updating the site is just pushing to a `gh-pages` branch

kennethko
I use Digital Ocean's App Platform which has free hosting for 3 static sites. CD is setup through integrations with GH/GL/BB, if I recall correctly. No particular reason why I chose this, other than I had a DO account open already for a few latent domains. It's proven to be simple enough & batteries included.
cmsparks
If you want to try out Cloudflare Pages again, you aren't required to have github integration. If you want to just upload and host some static assets you can use direct upload. You can basically just drag and drop/manually upload a zip file containing some HTML, JS, or other static assets and create a static site that way. (See: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/get-started/direct-u...)

(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer on Cloudflare Pages)

sodimel
I ususally go with alwaysdata, a tiny, reliable, french hosting solution.
cpach
“I have no idea if there's a hosting service that can offer something like that today”

There are lots of hosting providers that still offers this kind of functionality. I imagine that e.g. a lot of WordPress users still deploy in this manner.

As long as the provider offers SFTP you can use e.g. WinSCP or Cyberduck to drag and drop files.

shubhamjain
No offence, there's a bit of stubbornness when someone says, "I used an FTP client to upload whatever I wanted by a process that was pretty obvious." Git + Pages/Netlify is a different setup than FTP for sure, but it isn't more complicated. Just connect your git repo with Cloudflare pages and push things to it. If you don't like CLI, there are plenty of git clients to do the job. Hell, you can edit files on Github repo itself.

The reason I say this is, because as I have grown senior, I started noticing similar stubbornness in myself ("This was so much easy back in our days") and attitude of refusing to learn that came with it. I don't deny that some of the complexity in the web world is unwarranted, but when I refuse to invest my time in even trying to understand new solutions, I fail to acknowledge the benefits as well.

In the FTP days, it was easy to crash the whole site because of bad code that creeped in and no easy to way to decipher what change caused it. Cloudflare pages allow my to restore my site to any point of time and makes it easier to keep track of changes.

I think it's important to keep an open mind when it comes to new solutions.

ryandetzel
Agreed. Once you get over the small hurdle of learning something new often times the new confusing method is much easier than the old way.
Michelangelo11
The issue is not, as you call it, refusing to learn new things. The issue is that it's relatively hard to find solutions for your problem rather than the very biggest and most complex problem -- in other words, trying to find something to kill a housefly with and only being offered field artillery.

The benefits of Cloudflare pages that you describe are certainly very real, but for a static site consisting of a couple of files that's built by a reasonably experienced person and that will receive essentially no ongoing changes, they're not needed -- so all the extra complexity of CF pages is unjustified. If I were building a reasonably high-traffic commercial site with a JS framework, a backend, user accounts, and so on, I'm sure I would be genuinely grateful for CF Pages' features, but I just need to kill a housefly and I don't want to spend time wheeling field artillery into position.

vkaku
- S3/R2/GS

- Github Pages / Cloudflare Pages

- Heroku / Cloudflare Workers

- ngrok

Take your pick. You can get a lot done with many of these and with a free quota.

marvin-hansen
Cloudflare sites for Hugo or any other static site generator. It's free, it's simple, and updates on each git push.
ryandetzel
I did this a few months ago, and CF Pages is by far the most flexible and easy way once you have it setup. Spend some time just setting it up and understanding it and then making changes is just a commit and push away. Scales well and offers a lot of other features some of the other platforms don't, for free
helij
My go-to is VPS on Vultr (the cheapest one) with FreeBSD + nginx.
arthur234
I find Netlify has a nicer interface for setting up a site through Git(Hub) (more hand-holding), but it also lets you upload a site by dragging and dropping a folder into their UI.
romanhn
You can set up an S3 public bucket that will serve as a free static host. Just copy the files via UI or command line and you're set.
GeneralMaximus
If you don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up a Git repository and connecting it to Netlify, you can always use Netlify Drop: https://app.netlify.com/drop

Just drag and drop the directory containing your website to the page, and it takes care of the rest. Very convenient for hosting simple fire and forget web pages online.

meiraleal
There are so many easy ways to deploy simple html files today. This sounds like old man yelling at the clouds rant, not a real issue.
dyeje
I think Vercel and Render are both pretty good for simple static sites.
alabhyajindal
I really like using Netlify. Just drag and drop your files if you don't want to use Git integration.
drakonka
For just HTML, JS, and some images I default to an S3 bucket these days.
throwaway154
> That's exactly what I'd like to be able to do again

Dreamhost.com (or one of the many others).

Pick 'webhosting' as the option. You may even get a free .com for a year, just like back in the day.

Github pages and CDNs and CMSs and one-click install and VPSs and all that jazz don't fix an unbroken problem: Hosting static files on a webserver that likely hosts hundreds or thousands of sites effortlessly.

None of that jazz is needed. FTP your files. With FileZilla. Like back in the day.