Is there a good alternative to github pages? I need just a static website up.
- I have a domain.
- I have my site (local machine)
- And that’s all I have.
- I have a machine that could be running 24/7 too.
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Something that may help:
Why doesn’t GitHub Pages fit your use case? It’s nice to get free static hosting from them.
AI encroachment
In what way? Anything on the public internet is likely being used for AI training. I guess by using free GitHub you can’t object to training.
Then again anywhere you host you sort of run into the same problem. You can use robots.txt, but things don’t have to listen to it.
Self-hosting there are some ways to fight back, or depending on your opinions on Cloudflare it seems they’re fairly effective at blocking the AI crawlers.
Yep, on top of simply blocking, if you’re self hosting or using cloudflare, you can enable AI tarpits.
How do I do this? I don’t mind (and may prefer) to host not at home. My main concern with GH is that you become an AI snack whether you like it or not.
Github, acquired by Microsoft, is now forcing AI on its user base.
That’s one of my main drivers to stay away from GH
I don’t want to serve my work in silver plate to theis AI.
You need to qualify this statement, GotHib Pages can mean like two or maybe more things. Do you mean free static site hosting? Do you mean easy static site generation from Markdown files?
Edit: GotHib 😭 what a typo
Hi, I have means to generate the html/css/js myself. I am indeed, serving them in my LAN (
python -m http.server)I need help learning how to make it accessible from the web.
I don’t mind hosting somewhere else, but I really wouldn’t like my work being an easy snack for some AI. That’s why I’m not inclined to use GotHib 😁
Sorry to say, but if you put it on the internet the AI bots are going to gobble it down.
Only way to protect it is to not put it on the public net. If you add a challenge (login or something) it might stay unmolested, but that’s no longer a static site.
So long as your content is FLOSS, Codeberg Pages is a good choice perhaps. https://docs.codeberg.org/codeberg-pages/
Codeberg Pages. Neocities.
Besides other pages alternatives you could try a cheap vps. They start as low as $10/year and any will be plenty for a static site. It’s also fun to play around with hosting other stuff. lowendbox.com has some good listings.
I think vercel (formerly zeit.co) has a free tier for static websites.
Your DNS provider may offer static hosting as a paid service. I’m using porkbun and their static hosting is pretty cheap, plus they handle SSL and whatnot for me.
Ok, so I must’ve misunderstood the question, because to me it seems OP already has all the necessary ingredients to bake this dish. And yet, the vast majority of comments recommend various 3rd party services which is the complete opposite of selhosting.
Fire up nginx/apache2, and all good, no? What am I missing?Hi, thanks for the comment. I have the page. But I don’t know how to make the page accessible from the web.
I have a router at home that my ISP provided (I cannot even login to it) which provides WiFi and have a couple of Ethernet ports.
I don’t know if it is possible to make my page available to the world from behind this soho
Are you able to ask your ISP customer service to set up port forwarding for you?
At minimal you want HTTP, but you probably want 443 as well. If you’re hosting DNS as well you will need port 53 too.
Have those ports routed to the “inside” IP of the machine you want to use, and the rest of it is basically just setting up the webserver (and possibly DNS) to serve your domain.
NB: While on the phone with your ISP, ask them what the DHCP lease time is. Ideally you want a static IP for your setup.
I honestly wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have a minimum of security knowledge. The moment your home server pops up with a domain name it will get scanned by shady actors and possibly exploited.
I think the missing piece is the website itself? The static HTML page generator?
Something like Hugo
I was confused when I read it as well, at least I know now that I wasn’t alone. I think the next step is just opening a text editor and starting with <html></html> Forward a couple ports, maybe use caddy to route the port internally but it isn’t needed. Although if you use NOIP with Caddy getting the https cert setup seems to be pretty easy.
You may look at SDF.org they provide shell accounts and hosting.
I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).
The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.
Neocities?
I also thought about it, but the custom domain feature only works on the $5 / month plan.
So, uh…
Digital Ocean Is pretty inexpensive at US$7 monthly for 1 vCPU/1GB RAM with 1TB transfer. Decent platform. US-based, alas.
(2025 September, for the archives)
Oracle Cloud will give you far more for free.
Oracle Cloud will also delete your shit for the price of admission.
Caveat emptor, hey?
Mine has been running for years now without any such deletions.
AWS S3 lets you upload all content to a bucket, then mark it as a website. If usage is not too heavy, it can stay under the free tier.
But a favorite free one is Cloudflare pages: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/techtips/deploying-static-website-to-cloudflare-pages/
You can keep your content on github, connect it to a CF page, and have it auto-update on push to github.
I built this for my personal use: https://git.prisma.moe/aichan/simple_web_editor
I use nginx you can have configs for different sites and have the server_name have the domain for each server block (I use a file per site) and you can either do static via a root folder, or proxy_pass for active running servers, and nginx will map the domains to the server blocks you should also have a default, and you can then have multiple domains point to the same ip address, but keep in mind that home internet often has a dynamic ip, so you may need to update it every so often. There is a service to help with the dynamic ip I think noip.com has a solution available, but feel free to look around.
