So a personal website with a personal blog is ok then.

Curious though how it handles a surge in requests, like from being on the front-page of HN. But many open source projects host their doc pages with Github pages and some of those get a lot of traffic so I'm sure that it's not an issue

GitHub Pages runs everything through a Fastly CDN. You can tell like this:

  curl -i https://simonw.github.io/

I get this:

  HTTP/2 200 
  server: GitHub.com
  content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  permissions-policy: interest-cohort=()
  last-modified: Wed, 16 Nov 2022 21:38:29 GMT
  access-control-allow-origin: *
  etag: "63755855-299"
  expires: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:20:50 GMT
  cache-control: max-age=600
  x-proxy-cache: MISS
  x-github-request-id: 3D02:22250F:11BEDCA:123BE7A:68092D2A
  accept-ranges: bytes
  age: 0
  date: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:10:50 GMT
  via: 1.1 varnish
  x-served-by: cache-pao-kpao1770029-PAO
  x-cache: MISS
  x-cache-hits: 0
  x-timer: S1745431851.518299,VS0,VE110
  vary: Accept-Encoding
  x-fastly-request-id: 0df3187f050552dfde088fae8a6a83e0dde187f5
  content-length: 665

The x-fastly-request-id is the giveaway.

The "front page of HN" has not scaled like the rest of the computing hardware has scaled. The smallest VM you can get serving static content will yawn at the full power of an HN surge. Unless you have a very 200x-era bandwidth limit, or you're trying to be on the front page of HN with a 250MB web page (which does happen), it's not anything to be concerned about anymore.

The way I understand this is not that Github Pages can't be used for commercial purposes, but that it's not OK for something like ecommerce with many users every minute which generates a lot of load?

So a small company could host a static landing page with generic info and "contact us" etc., and that would be fine, I think?

It also mentions that breaking the rules will result in getting a "polite email suggesting ways to reduce load on Github".