You can always add CloudFlare in front of it. They also provide free SSL certificates.

That's.. not the same.

In case SSL support is essential to you please know that we'll looking to bring it to _GitLab_ Pages in a few months https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/134

Is GitLab pages going to be available to non-enterprise gitlab.com users? If not, may I respectfully request that it is?

Thanks for asking. Right now we have no plans to merge it into GitLab CE. Can I ask what your use case is? How many people are using your GitLab installation and how many static sites are you planning?

No way. Asking for free stuff when you don't need it or can buy it cannot be respectful.

> non-enterprise gitlab.com users

No one was asking for it to be free. Currently it's tracked as a feature for enterprise users. They have 3 paid plans for non-enterprise users, and I'm certain many of those non-enterprise folks would love it.

I'm sorry. My comment was intended as a joke.

I eventually moved to S3+CloudFront so I could host my personal static sites with SSL. The s3_website gem works remarkably well, in my experience.

The cost is probably negligible for typical blogs, portfolios, etc. Amazon's new free certificate service might also be a bonus.

What do you mean? https://ephtracy.github.io works fine, for example.

They mean for CNAME'd sites: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...

Yes, this is correct.

He (probably) means with a custom domain.

Hey, you can use https://kloudsec.com to do that.

You can even get a custom domain with SSL (via LetsEncrypt) going for it.

Here's what you need to do:

* Set a CNAME record for your Github Page: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...

* Add custom domain to Kloudsec

* Update custom domain to Kloudsec's Anycast CDN IP

* Enable "One-click Encryption" plugin to automatically provision a LE cert.

* If you want to automatically redirect all HTTP -> HTTPS: https://kloudsec.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/90...

Hope this helps :)

Today, I tried out your service with a previously-unused domain and a brand new gh-pages repo.

When I ran into a small issue, I used the instant chat applet inside the Kloudsec control panel, and Steven quickly discovered the problem (I simply needed to remove the two A records pointing to GitHub pages, leaving only the Kloudsec A record).

Everything is working flawlessly so far, in regards to having TLS/SSL for custom domain hosted on GitHub pages. I especially like the option to enable HSTS for the domain's SSL. I wish GitHub Pages' own SSL on username.github.com offered that option.

All in all, painless plus quick, and without the unclean feeling that comes with Cloudflare's free SSL option. Additionally, I'm impressed with Steven's quick and quality assistance via chat and email.

edit: I've now noticed that there are large blocks of Javascript injected into my one-page test website. Ostensibly for the Speed Booster CDN plugin; I'll update after confirming the JS is gone upon disabling all plugins aside from the One-Click Encryption plugin.

edit2: Confirmed. Speed Booster plugin was source of JS injection. I suppose that's the drawback to a CDN who doesn't also host your DNS. Ironically, due to test site being small and static, disabling the Speed Booster plugin to remove all the JavaScript increased page load speeds.

Still, this doesn't detract from Kloudsec's simple deployment of LetsEncrypt SSL certificates for custom domains hosted on GitHub pages.

I don't know much about GitHub Pages, but if it's only for static pages, then why do you need SSL? I mean if you're not going to be sending sensitive dynamic data. Is it so people can't snoop the contents of your pages over request/response on a network?

Google uses https as a signal of quality, and Chrome will start shaming sites that aren't:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-will-soon-shame-all-...

I only have static, unimportant data on my site, but I use HTTPS in case someone's ISP is injecting ads or scripts into their pages. I don't want people to think that's part of my website.

You might be serving something like a PGP public key, which you'd like viewers to be assured hasn't been tampered with in transit.

https is also for authentication, not just encryption.

I'm working on a static hosting service. We are working on SSL and making that easy. Would you be interested in trying the beta? http://www.statichosting.co

Some feedback:

The cost is a non-starter. The main reason I go through the hassle of writing compilers for my websites is that I want them to be long-lived.

Presently, I use Nearly Free Speech as my hosting provider. Their pricing scheme for static sites costs me about $2.50/yr and I can maintain an account balance. My $50 account balance will keep my site online for two decades whereas it would buy me only ten months on your service. (Not to mention that Github hosts static sites for free!)

To consider another service, it wouldn't just have to beat the cost but instill a sense of confidence that I could trust the service with my data for the foreseeable future. A few features could tip the scales though: - Open ID auth instead of basic access auth - Easy SSL setup (gethttpsforfree.com was recently a huge help) - Inexpensive hosting for a very low-volume mailing list with HTML archives

Good luck!

You might look into FreeLists [0] for your mailing list needs.

[0]: https://www.freelists.org

Nice. One way you could distinguish your service from all other options (S3, Github Pages), is to support the history API for single page webapps. I'm hosting a static site on EC2 instead of S3 because I need URLs to fallback to index.html. Literally for this one nginx rule:

    location / {
        try_files $uri /index.html =404;
    }

Also, I'd like to try the beta of your service, just signed up. My email is in my profile. Thanks!

Surge and Firebase hosting both allow for this

Dope, didn't find Surge when I was searching. Thanks, I'll switch over to that!

Staying away from Firebase after what happened to Parse.

Your site doesn't accept connections over SSL.

I know. We haven't added SSL to our site. That's one reason we are still in beta.

My partner and I are finishing up a CLI app and then SSL comes after that. We are hoping to integrate nicely with something like letsencrypt.org, but we don't have a working solution yet.

I know from experience that HTTPS setup isn't as easy, nice, or cheap as it should be and we plan to fix that if possible for static sites.

Well, technically, it does. The unfortunate thing is that it also supports non-encrypted HTTP. In my opinion, gh-pages is one of those places where it's not a big deal; there isn't anything too private being uploaded, and all the pages that can be served are available publicly on Github.

Edit: oh, I didn't know that it's not supported for custom domains. That is a bit disappointing.

That's one of tne of the main reasons for which I moved my GitHub Pages to a DigitalOcean droplet.