Static Hosting on a Budget

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# Static Web Hosting on a Budget

???
I thought that I had purchased lifetime hosting, but I got left high and dry and needed to rehost my weblog this spring. Here's the cliff notes version of my decision process
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# Static vs CMS Sites

* Static (Jekyll, Hexo, ...)
    * Speed
    * Robust
    * Secure
        * nothing to inject SQL into
        * Staged on your workstation and uploaded → one path to secure.
    * Cheap
* CMS (Drupal, Wordpress, ...)
    * Flexibility
        * Target content
        * Target presentation
    * Self-sufficient (don't need service like Disqus for comments)
    * Remote updates (including mobile devices)
    * Rebuilds are easy
???
I started on a static weblog 11 years ago. The cool kids were moving to dynamic sites. Now the cool kids are moving back to static weblogs.

http servers are fast, static sites tend to be network bandwidth limited.
even if you get fireballed, then everyone wants the same server-cached page.
tricky configuration to make a dynamic sites handle very heavy loads.

static site will need responsive html
dynamic site can look at headers and choose a presentation template.
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# Some Static Hosting Options

* VPS
* Shared hosting
* Amazon S3
* Github

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# VPS

Static site should be fine on the smallest instance
* Digital Ocean for $5/month
* Linode for $10/month
* AWS for $10/month (1 year free)
???
You're the sys admin for everything, including DNS
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# Shared Hosting

**Buyer beware**
- Constant transitions from well-provisioned servers to over-subscribed servers and hopefully back.
- sponsored reviews abound and make it hard to find the truth

$35/year and up

Check your email provider - some plans include static hosting.
- fastmail.fm has a $40/year plan for 15GB IMAP, Custom Domain and static hosting.
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# Amazon S3

* Scales as big as your wallet
* Low entry cost - $0.64 last month for 1451 users, 1633 sessions and 3039 page views
    * Fixed cost of about $0.52 for Route53 (DNS) and static storage
    * Variable cost of $0.12 → 10x traffic for another $1.20, 100x traffic for $12.00

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# Github Pages

* 1 per account (project must be named ***username***.github.io)
* Free
* Version control included
* Supports custom domains
* Automatic Page Generator
* Can also host a jekyll [jekyllrb.com](http://jekyllrb.com/) site
* Github Pages Basics: [help.github.com/categories/20/articles](https://help.github.com/categories/20/articles)