Static Site Hosting, Briefly

Lately, I've been launching more and more static sites. At first, I thought that I would always be happy using GitHub Pages, but it turns out, I was not.

So I've been exploring other static website hosting providers. Allow me to share my first impressions with each of them.

This will be brief, and in no particular order.

GitHub Pages

• Easy to start with.
• No redirects. Very limited flexibility, unless you use GitHub Actions.

Netlify

• Very flexible. Good CLI.
• I had weird issues with CDN caching or something.

Render

• Seems good so far.
• I've only been using it for a day.

Cloudflare Pages

• Pretty dang nice. Maybe I should use it more?
• A lot of people seem to hate Cloudflare?

Neocities

• Nice and simple. Good mission, good cause.
• With no Git integration and a slow CLI I had to sudo install, it's not very automation-friendly.

DigitalOcean

• Full-featured cloud platform, but static sites are still pretty easy.
• Three static sites for free, then a per-site monthly charge for any more.

Surge.sh

• Used to be great, and it's still online, but it seems like its been unmaintained for years.