What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are:
1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...)
2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...)
3. Expensive hosting ($40/m+)
The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple content. Or cheap but excellent services like linode, digitalocean, or vultr. They set you back $5/m or less.
Host your own content, make local backups. If your provider complains, find another host, copy and paste your content and update the dns.
I use the “clever hacks” because I’m afraid of one of my blog articles getting linked to on Reddit. Even if there are no ads on my site, I want it to stay up and readable, and I don’t want to suddenly get an egress-bandwidth bill in the process!
Also, despite having done ops for years, I don’t want my continued willingness to do ops (as with DO/Linode/Vultr) or my continued usage of my small municipal ISP (or even my small municipal ISP’s continued existence, as these often get bought up, and their branding—including web-host domains!—gets blown away in the process) to determine whether my site stays up. I want my website to continue to exist, at the same URL, even if I retire and go live in the mountains with no Internet for the rest of my life. I want my works to outlive me!
There are “good” shared HTML hosts that have been around for decades and will likely be around for decades more—SDF.org is one; most universities with accounts for alumni are another—but these don’t tend to be able to handle the bandwidth, so you have to combine them with a service like Cloudflare anyway.
But really, “slug-based static-site build-product hosting” like Github Pages and Netlify are just shared HTML hosts as well—with some extra features, sure, but ones that you can ignore if you please. With GH Pages, for example, you don’t have to use a static-site generator if you don’t want to; you can just commit content assets directly to your github-pages branch. And the result has the same properties you list: if Github complains, I can take that same repo and push it to another site; or it can gracefully degrade to being a folder (that happens to have a .git dir in it) that I can plop into any public_html directory.
> I use the “clever hacks” because I’m afraid of one of my blog articles getting linked to on Reddit. Even if there are no ads on my site, I want it to stay up and readable, and I don’t want to suddenly get an egress-bandwidth bill!
I use DO. My site often gets linked on Reddit and hn and the $10 service handles it just fine. One article I wrote recently got 5 million web requests.
I like shared hosting, not only it is very cheap, but you do not get to bother with administration stuff. You cannot run everything you'd probably like, like in a VPS, but pretty much every provider has at least PHP support with some database and most also provide Python, Perl and CGI support (the latter wont be fast but you can use it to upload CGIs written in compiled languages like Go). If you stick with static sites (like i do) performance shouldn't be a problem at all.
https://idiallo.com
What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are:
1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...)
2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...)
3. Expensive hosting ($40/m+)
The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple content. Or cheap but excellent services like linode, digitalocean, or vultr. They set you back $5/m or less.
Host your own content, make local backups. If your provider complains, find another host, copy and paste your content and update the dns.