Namecheap, Dreamhost, GoDaddy even (well maybe not them lol). There are a billion shared hosts everywhere and CPanel really isn't hard to use for HTTPS enabling or getting FTP locations to work with.
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Bonus points: shove a random .php file in there and it probably will work if you need just a little bit of dynamic content.
Nothing, other than that it's not cool with the kids because it's the grandpa's way of being a webmaster.
Personally, being an old school grump, I'll choose FTP upload over Git nonsense any day of the week because why in the nine seas of the seven hells do I need to sign up for Github, upload all my crap there, download-install and run a Git daemon, feed it my Github login credentials, let the daemon download and sync/compile/whatever the code I have there, and then probably run the whole contraption through sixty dozen frameworks of JavaShit to have a website?
I'll just fire up Filezilla or whatever is the trendy FTP client nowadays, punch in my login creds, upload my crap that I wrote up in Notepad++, maybe have some fun with PHP because I'm old school, and be done with it. :V
GIT is extremely useful for versioning. I want that. If I make a dumb mistake I want to have a diff that I've fixed a typo / grammar / added more links etc.
You neither need to use GitHub nor give your GitHub credentials to anything. You can just make a public repo and have it cloned / pulled-from by literally anyone interested -- why would anyone clone your public blog repo and re-host it? You can use sr.ht, Codeberg or just host your own GIT -- it's not that hard if you're into it (I am not).
Your way of doing it is fine but let's not pretend that everyone else is following fashion or coolness. That's very rarely true. There's a list of very good reasons to use a public GIT repo + Netlify + use a static site generator on your own machine to only produce a directory of HTML+CSS files.
For a multi-user environment where a dozen people could be accessing the same file at any given time, yeah some sort of version control system will probably make everyone's life easier.
For a single user environment as is likely the case for most static websites? Yeah, it's just needless complexity.
In fact, you lost me at "static site generator". WTF? Just write the damn HTML and CSS yourself, it's static after all.
This isn't to say your way isn't wrong /for you/, of course. Whatever floats your boat. For me, it's all just unnecessary complexity that will invite in all sorts of gremlins to waste my time.
At a minimum, static site generators create indexes, table-of-contents, tags, sorts by date, and other such features.
Pretty much no one writes good, raw, HTML these days. Documentation is written Sphinx, texinfo, docbook, and many other formats. Why? Because compiling chapters (or pages) together through static analysis is a very useful pattern for writing.
HTML is just an output pattern. Your actual words should be in a document generator at a minimum.
[1]: https://notpushk.in/
Nope. Anything I can have a machine generate for me is fancy if I have to write it by hand.
Hard disagree. As I said above and you ignored it (no clue why): I want to have a history of my static website.
> In fact, you lost me at "static site generator". WTF? Just write the damn HTML and CSS yourself, it's static after all.
I can and I don't want to. Markdown is tons easier, you write out an article, execute one command, push the updated HTML+CSS files to GIT and you're done. If we're talking about simplicity let's not ignore that scenario because it really is quite simple.
I got a backlog of 30 things to work on and 500+ to check out "one day when I have the time". Going back to hand-crafting HTML is likely at spot #1784 in my brain. It's a meaningless paperwork that can and must be outsourced to computers.
Git is great for collaborative or complex projects, but for a static site, you're using a freight train to bring a single tomato to market.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve been a customer since 2004
But I guess my overall point is that CPanel is way easier than anything the original poster / author wrote.
Disclaimer: I work there ;)
You just connect your git repo and tell it what command to run to build your site and where the html output is
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253277
I think it is good, and will solve people's static hosting problem. It's a server that you don't have to manage. It has a nice fast custom web interface.
Except I didn't realize it was FreeBSD. That probably doesn't matter for most, but I'm used to Linux, so I like Dreamhost better. Also I feel like they are using some kind of slower NFS disk, whereas Dreamhost feels like a bare metal disk mostly.
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I was trying to find another thread here, where someone remarked that "shared hosting" got a bad reputation in the early days due to janky control panels and bad/aggressive marketing.
Also a lot of the companies seem to have gotten acquired in the early 2000's, i.e. they changed hands a lot.
But again I've been using Dreamhost since 2009 and it's been great. No complaints except the typical thing everyone does of raising the domain name pricing after a year (the advertised price is the "first year discount").
They have not raised the hosting fees. (You might save $3 per year using a domain name purchased elsewhere, but that doesn't seem worth the hassle to me.)
So I thought there were many other shared hosting companies, but maybe not? Maybe they all got caught up in acquisitions and then the service declined? (That's exactly what's going to happen with the free cloud services you're all using now BTW, so that's why I stick with something older and proven.)
I have used 1and1 in the early 2000's, but I remember it being very janky and weird, and Dreamhost is a lot better technically. They seem to have more competent system administration.
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FWIW here is a thread with some competitors:
https://lobste.rs/s/jkutwc/recommendations_for_shared_hostin...
Honestly I wonder if Dreamhost is more unique now than it used to be? I thought of it as "commodity shared hosting" -- i.e. a Linux OS and a web server. But I think that actually being able to manage that competently is a dying art :-/
Other threads I bookmarked while looking for shared hosting that supports FastCGI (dynamic sites, not static, and not PHP!):
bluehost: https://www.bluehost.com/help/article/fastcgi-for-php
hostgator: https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/does-hostgator-suppor...
I'd be interested to know if those companies are comparable to dreamhost!
Also at that point I had used Dreamhost for ~10 years, so I was just more comfortable with it. I like how my files are in ~/oilshell.org and my logs are in ~/logs/oilshell.org. If I had started with NearlyFreeSpeech I'm sure it would have been fine
IIRC the reason I tried it was because I was looking for FastCGI support (i.e. non-PHP dynamic sites that you don't have to maintain a daemon for)
I don't quite remember, but I think they did have some FastCGI support, but it wasn't quite what I wanted, or maybe the Python version was different, etc. It looks like a great service, but I don't currently use it
Their custom panel with deep integrations are phenomenal for side projects or small businesses. In under a minute you can have your web server, SSL cert, database and more all setup and working - and you don’t have to manage any of it.
I wish more companies offered their level of managed services.
(If anyone knows of others, I’d like to hear who)