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Ask HN: Fastest static site host?

7 points by zuck9 ↗ HN
My Jekyll website is currently powered by a shared web hosting plan from HostGator with unlimited disk space & bandwidth (CloudFlare enabled).

I've heard about Heroku which hosts websites for free and GitHub Pages. I won't exceed 2TB bandwidth/month nor do I need more than 300 MB space so I comply with both GitHub Pages & Heroku's limitations.

Which of the following will serve the website fastest to users (and with the max uptime)?

  Shared web hosting (I deploy via rsync)
  GitHub Pages
  Heroku with 1x dyno
  Amazon CloudFront
I think shared web hosting is slower than the other options. So, what should I use? Is there any other option which is better than all these?

My website gets about 15k pageviews/daily.

19 comments

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seguer
If you've got a completely static site and it's being served out of a CDN, the underlying hosting shouldn't really be an issue.

The majority of users/web requests aren't going to be hitting your hosting; they'll stop at the CDN.

Perhaps a better question is "fastest CDN?".

zuck9
I'm a newbie in web development (well technically not development but the web infrastructure, CDN/DNS/Nameserver/etc.)

As long as I use CloudFlare, it doesn't matter what host I'm using, right?

I've been thinking of ditching shared hosting and switching to Heroku since it'll be free (and git is always awesome).

ShinyCyril
If you're behind a CDN then use whatever backend suits your deployment style the best. If you like working with git then GitHub pages and Heroku are both great.
octopus
You could try a VPS from Digital Ocean, cheapest option is $5 and gives you 1TB of bandwidth.
zuck9
Does VPS have any advantages over other services? I'd refrain from using it--no git, not scalable, maintenance required.
radicality
The advantage, if you are into that sort of thing (managing servers), is that it's fully customizable however you desire. You can most definitely install git on a VPS. As a side-effect, you'll learn some server management/maintenance things.
hubot
github pages and heroku are free. i prefer github pages though. if you want a vps, DO is cheap ($5/month) or Ramnode($15/year)
zuck9
You might wanna strip that affiliate link and btw HN doesn't support markdown.

GH Pages doesn't support Jekyll plugins and the repo is public. Heroku supports both Jekyll plugins and private hosting for free.

brianwawok
If it is a static website I don't think making the source code public will hurt much ;)
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jcanyc
The cheapest Github account is extremely economical if you price out all the features you get with the account. For your needs and price point, I don't think you're going to find (or even be able to identify) much of a difference for from your end users' experience.
toonbit
I host my jekyll site in a s3 bucket, works pretty well, and I end up paying a few dollars a month for it.
anishkothari
try S3 - I found it to be extremely performant and inexpensive at the same time. Put a copy of your site there and see how it does. It you're happy with the performance, add Route 53 and change your site's nameservers to Amazon's. Good luck and have fun with this! I put a site up without a lot of previous knowledge and learned a lot in the process.
cpursley
I can't recommend divshot.io enough. It's so much easier than rsync and better performing than Heroku. In fact, the UI reminds me of Heroku in a way.
mbleigh
cpursely: Thanks for the kind recommendation!

OP: I'm one of the cofounders of Divshot and our entire platform was built to be the answer to this question. Fast static web hosting for developers.

We also support stuff like clean URLs (no .html at the end), pushState routing for single-page apps, staging environments built-in to every app, and more. I hope you'll take a look!

http://www.divshot.com/

cpursley
You guys have good blog posts as well. Do you know anything about implementing fairly complex authorization (role based) for angular?