My first question would be: why not just use an S3 bucket directly, with web hosting enabled?

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

It's a good question. Reminds me of the first time I heard about Dropbox - I thought, 'why not just do a rsync'?

Yeah, good question. S3 is a hassle for some people (designer-types) and we're building additional services around the hosting part (form submissions, a simple CMS, etc). If you get a chance, try out the demo and let me know what you think. scottgallant[at]gmail

What about Divshot, BitBalloon, Netlify and Github Pages? Between the 4 of those, there's a range of prices and functionality that fit pretty much any need.

Note that the goal of this question is to help you explain what makes you unique, not to as a gotcha. I'd like to get an idea of when your offering is the appropriate choice since I'm looking at needing a static webhost in the next few months.

I was going to reply, but what you said :P .. I think it's great that initiatives like this are taken, but of course a market fit is important if you want to make a dent.

Looks great, but I'll never fork over cash for a service that doesn't even have an imprint. I don't care about ToC, but I want to see that somebody with a name is behind this thing.

Edit: Another thing: What about email? The beauty of cPanel and whatnot is that it comes with email to my domain and is usually easy to set up as well.

You might want to charge (a lot) more. How many $1/mo accounts will you need to make any sort of profit?

Hosting is cheap. Especially hosting static sites.

For e-commerce (coming soon?), contact forms, and content editing. They charge extra to use their barebones CMS. That's where the real profit will be coming from.

$11/yr for a contact form is another $1/month for a very basic service. Content-Editable is another $3~/mo that people would take advantage of (ie: tech user hosting the static site here and handing it off to a non-tech user, rather than having to edit the HTML for any future content edits).

Our math tells us that $1/month will result in surprisingly high margins, however, we're hoping to sell services around the hosting of static sites. Need an e-commerce back-end? Premium templates? etc.

Did you try the demo? Would you use this kind of thing? Do you find yourself building stupidly simple sites for everyone you know (like I do)?

> Our math tells us that $1/month will result in surprisingly high margins

What happens when a site uses too much bandwidth for this to hold? The first thing I looked for was information about storage and bandwidth limits, but I don't see that anywhere.

Those are outliers and are rarer than you think. Ask anyone who offers free hosting how many of these large sites they have.

Heliohost, as an example, only restricts sites based on CPU Usage. Free hosting of up to 500MB, unlimited bandwidth. But metered CPU Usage. Even then that's hard to hit.

That's a good point. It's really going to be a game of averages. Most small websites that I build (for restaurants, bands, conversion pages, etc) get a negligible amount of traffic. But every now and then there will be a site that sees 100x that traffic.

Or 100000x that traffic. One $1/month site that bursts to unexpectedly excessive bandwidth could wipe out the margins on thousands of such sites.

Storage is easy to set limits on in advance, but you're going to want some sensible limits on bandwidth usage too. With some care, you could do so via throttling (fixed average bandwidth with bursting) so that you never need to cut a site off entirely.