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Reliable small package shared hosting options for a couple of static (commercial) sites?
wedirl_simpiu
Member
Price wise I don't think it matters. I mean that I don't want to scrimp on price but at the same time I don't want to waste money on unneccesary resources. Just want a reliable small package from a solid company that won't dissappear in a few months especially since I plan to not be around my computer as much in this coming year so wouldn't be able to fix some screw up as easily. I was having to contact nexusbytes once every couple of weeks for some cock up throughout being with them.
I am fed up with these fly by night tiny companies, having had to switch like 5 times in the last couple of years, so want some bigger company that will last. I see racknerd is saturated everywhere and they seem big and long standing with good service. Are there any contenders? I see they have a new year plan for small shared package at something like $8 per year for 3 addon domains.
I recently read from elsewhere that I could take a free plan with cloudflare (github seems off the cards due to the site's commercial nature) to host the sites, since they are static. Sounds like a neat idea but is it much of a learning curve? AWS I read as another option however I have boycotted amazon on ethical grounds for some time.
I have no problem learning, and at other times would have enjoyed this task, but I might be moving soon so don't want to get involved in anything substantial at the moment. Just looking to get my sites back up after nexusbytes having ghosted and cpanel and directadmin are what I have used before.
I don't mind paying. Just want reliable especially as I am planning some life stuff where I won't be having access to the computer regularly. Plan on just going online more sporadically (this is going to be a big change having been glued to the computer almost constantly most of my adult life!) so reliability is paramount but still for a reasonable price since the sites are tiny and not making any money.
I had thought of buying a vps and self managing. This would have been an attractive idea and fun learning experience in other times, and something I had often thought about, however given the aforementioned, of not going to have access to computers much for some time, I think it best to find a simpler solution at this point. Perhaps on the backburner for the future.
I basically just want to keep them online for seo ripening and so I can have the option to come back to them should I so choose in future.
Requirements are very low. They are just a couple of static html sites with some js for functions which I made myself from the ground up. I think they only come to 10-20mbs disk space each. As mentioned no real traffic so bandwidth shouldn't be and issue.
Comments
Tbh for a tiny static site that's html and CSS, I'd look into something like cloudflare pages or hosting it using bunny.net storage + cdn. They won't be going anywhere, will require zero maintenance, cost barely anything and provide superior performance.
It's all super simple. Just create a private github repo for each site, push your code and connect it up to cloudflare.
I was gonna suggest using bunny.net edge storage for static sites. But keep in mind that you need to spend $1 a month minimum unless you have a grandfathered account.
Get on to github and get it done with something like netlify or fly.io plus cloudflare or gcore cdn for edge caching and you get a fast static website for almost zero in spending.
Didn't they lift that like months ago?
Surely you can skip netlify and just go straight cloudflare
Really!? I'm not sure because I have used more than $1 recently. The last time I was billed less than $1 was in November 2022.
Can you tell me what the purpose of netlify or fly.io are for? I have the sites already made. I thought it would just be a case of dumping them in a repo and then gettting cloudflare to pull them? What would those two aforementioned things' purpose be? Ie would they be redundant given I have the sites ready to go in their respective folders?
If it was $1 per month that would defeat the purpose of using these 'free' platforms eh? Since shared hosting can be gotten for $1 per month and less.
You can use cloudflare in a few different ways. In this case fly.io and netlify would host the static content and you'd have cloudflare as a reverse proxy in front of that to provide caching and cdn etc.
It's the same as using cloudflare pages with an extra step.
That $1 a month gets you a cdn and knowledge that your cheap shared hosting provider isn't going to disappear
Looking for the simplest way. Which would that be?
I thought that github is where it would be or is that not the case?
buyshared.net seems to be quite hyped here, run by @Francisco who has a good reputation
Host it on github public repo deploy github pages and proxy through cloudflare. Or just host it somewhere else like gitlab with cloudflare proxy, there is also Digitalocean that provides some free static websites, if you look into it there are many such ways to host it for simple and cheap.
Just read the docs here https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/deploy-anything/. No need to use cloudflare as a proxy to anything. Just push your site to a github/gitlab repo, connect within the cloudflare dashboard and you're done.
Whenever you want to modify your site, modify the code, git commit, git push and it'll be automatically updated.
Just host it directly on cloudflare pages, link it to a domain and forget about it.
Is that the same process as using the github repo step bgerard mentioned?
Typically but any git repository should work, private/public etc.
Edit: Only works with github and gitlab.
Yeah I believe so, using a git repo is just a way of pushing your code to cloudflare (unless they support direct upload now? Idk). Cloudflare will the clone your code from that repo and distribute it across their servers.
Cool. I already have a github account. Reading the linked article now...
Ah does this indicate the github step can be skipped too?
Yes, you can direct upload the generated static websites with Clouflare Pages.
Looks like it
GitHub step can be skipped if you don’t frequently update the content. As far as I know cloudflare pages doesn’t have an editor so you need to edit the file locally and reupload. With GitHub linked, you can edit on GitHub and commit and it gets automatically deployed to cloudflare pages.
Yes this would work better, to not use github, because they are updated very irregularly. Don't plan to at all at the moment; just to get the sites live again and leave them.
I can offer you around 1000 MB of free hosting if they’re just static sites. PM me if you’re interested.
I am getting the error message:
Every time I try and upload the website folder to cloudflare pages. Anyone experienced this?
Never mind it was due to the browser.
EDIT: Oh this is sweet! Thanks for the recommendation guys. This is really simple after all. Much nicer solution than a paid shared host for these little sites of mine.