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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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.
Something that may help:
Why doesn’t GitHub Pages fit your use case? It’s nice to get free static hosting from them.
I don’t want to serve my work in silver plate to theis AI.
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.
Github, acquired by Microsoft, is now forcing AI on its user base.
That’s one of my main drivers to stay away from GH
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.
Digital Ocean’s app platform offers a toer tier to deploy static sites from Github and a few other places.
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?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.
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
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.
I built this for my personal use: https://git.prisma.moe/aichan/simple_web_editor
Use any static site generator and build a Docker container. You could even try out this idea though its lack of http/2+ support might not make it the best option.
HTTP 1.1 is more than good enough for serving a static website.
I think it depends on the number of assets. Generally speaking you’re probably right, but if there are a lot of small files it would be a lot smoother to load them over http/2.
There is zero question about it. It will be absolutely fine for some dude’s static website over a residential internet connection.
Whatever you say bro. I’m just a professional web application developer but what do I know?
Obviously someone who has never actually tested 1.1 vs 2 vs 3 lmao
Same? HTTP/1.1 ran the entire internet for 20 years and is used by a ton of sites. It’s fine for a personal website.
Some domain registers offer free webspace with the domain. OVH for example gives 100mb (incl. php) which is more than sufficient for a simple website.
