web hosting and domain name small static page

[Caravan Monster]

I've managed to write a static web page for the small business idea I'm putting together. There's every chance it won't bring in any work at all as these things are mostly by reference so I'm trying to do it on a shoe string and could well take it down after 12 months. I need to buy a .co.uk domain name for it which looks like it should cost next to nothing for something appropriate. Ionos looks ok for hosting but they are rather vague about t&cs and price but seem to be saying domain name + hosting including SSL certificate is about 10p a month. Is it a trap?  

The files for the web page come to a total 520 KiB and it's static, no databases or even email, so it seems a bit of a waste to pay for 10's of GB of storage. So far as I know the only extra I need is an SSL certificate as google want it for search ranking. Any recommendations from the dosbods experts for a cheap legit hosting firm? 

[MvR]

On 09/05/2020 at 17:09, Caravan Monster said:

I've managed to write a static web page for the small business idea I'm putting together. There's every chance it won't bring in any work at all as these things are mostly by reference so I'm trying to do it on a shoe string and could well take it down after 12 months. I need to buy a .co.uk domain name for it which looks like it should cost next to nothing for something appropriate. Ionos looks ok for hosting but they are rather vague about t&cs and price but seem to be saying domain name + hosting including SSL certificate is about 10p a month. Is it a trap?  

The files for the web page come to a total 520 KiB and it's static, no databases or even email, so it seems a bit of a waste to pay for 10's of GB of storage. So far as I know the only extra I need is an SSL certificate as google want it for search ranking. Any recommendations from the dosbods experts for a cheap legit hosting firm? 

Amazon Web Services is worth a look. I can't remember if I had to pay for my SSL certificate, but I know my ongoing costs are about 50p a month.  It might seem like overkill but the quality of the documentation and the plethora of YouTube and other tutorials makes it worth it.

[eek]

On 17/05/2020 at 00:25, MvR said:

Amazon Web Services is worth a look. I can't remember if I had to pay for my SSL certificate, but I know my ongoing costs are about 50p a month.  It might seem like overkill but the quality of the documentation and the plethora of YouTube and other tutorials makes it worth it.

Yep you add the files to an S3 bucket and follow the steps at https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/cloudfront-https-requests-s3/

[spunko]

Normally what I do when setting up a new server/website is register the .co.uk at Namecheap for about £4 a year,  deploy a cheap Ubuntu instance on Linode or Vultr for $5 a month, and then just use Easyengine + LetsEncrypt. Or Cloudflare for DNS (free).

Total cost for a website running Nginx with SSL that is super quick (top 95% speed) = ~£50 a year. Not bad.

If you are reasonably competent with Linux commands then it's child's play.

[spunko]

58 minutes ago, eek said:

True but none of these ways are the easiest way of doing things, they are the cheapest way of doing things with pros and cons

pros - delivery will be fast because everything is designed around fast delivery and it's dirty cheap

cons - you have additional steps because a lot of these things are designed around command line tools for automation purposes and the UI front ends are just poor wrappers around the command line interface.

If you don't fancy Aws this is an Azure walkthrough of what you need to do - this document is how to load files and make them visible via Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network) there is a link on the bottom as to how to make the CDN use https https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/cdn/cdn-add-to-web-app

Azure has  a fucking diabolical GUI as well.

Why not just stick to Cloudflare, it includes a free CDN? If you use Linode then you can just do a one-click install for loads of common builds... docker, Wordpress, even cPanel.

[eek]

4 minutes ago, spunko said:

Azure has  a fucking diabolical GUI as well.

Why not just stick to Cloudflare, it includes a free CDN? If you use Linode then you can just do a one-click install for loads of common builds... docker, Wordpress, even cPanel.

The original question was how to set up a static page for peanuts.

If you are willing to pay proper money £30 or so a year or more then there  are plenty of options around, if you don't want to do that you trade money for painful interfaces.

[spunko]

2 minutes ago, eek said:

The original question was how to set up a static page for peanuts.

If you are willing to pay proper money £30 or so a year or more then there  are plenty of options around, if you don't want to do that you trade money for painful interfaces.

Well I suppose it depends on what one defines as peanuts. I don't think it's possible to spend less than £30 a year on a website + domain. If you use these 1&1 / GoDaddy types then they'll just rebill you £200 after the cheapy trial.

[eek]

3 minutes ago, spunko said:

Well I suppose it depends on what one defines as peanuts. I don't think it's possible to spend less than £30 a year on a website + domain. If you use these 1&1 / GoDaddy types then they'll just rebill you £200 after the cheapy trial.

the S3 bucket with cloudfront approach is about $6 a year depending on the amount of data consumed.

Namecheap'ss cheap wordpress hosting comes to about £36 a year nowadays 

[spunko]

AWS isn't for beginners at all. It's incredibly shitty GUI is hard to use. I don't know how adept the OP is but if you're looking for an easy SSL install just sign up for Cloudflare, it's free and done by default.

[sam1994]

If he has a bit of know-how, he could use GitHub Pages and a CNAME record so he only has to host the domain.

He then also has some version control / a backup of things if his site goes tits up.

Jekyll is a good blogging platform which gives you CMS but  compiles it to static pages so no DB is needed.

[eek]

Here is someone using Google's firebase to host their wordpress site

https://saadhamid.me/2020/06/13/moving-wordpress-from-shared-hosting-to-firebase/

Downside is it's google.

Upsides are it's free and on google's servers so probably very good for SEO factors.

[eek]

14 hours ago, spunko said:

AWS isn't for beginners at all. It's incredibly shitty GUI is hard to use. I don't know how adept the OP is but if you're looking for an easy SSL install just sign up for Cloudflare, it's free and done by default.

 

True but none of these ways are the easiest way of doing things, they are the cheapest way of doing things with pros and cons

pros - delivery will be fast because everything is designed around fast delivery and it's dirty cheap

cons - you have additional steps because a lot of these things are designed around command line tools for automation purposes and the UI front ends are just poor wrappers around the command line interface.

If you don't fancy Aws this is an Azure walkthrough of what you need to do - this document is how to load files and make them visible via Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network) there is a link on the bottom as to how to make the CDN use https https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/cdn/cdn-add-to-web-app

[Carl Fimble]

People recommended Gandi to me and though I've only used them to buy and hold a domain name, the do hosting too. 

It's never going to be 10p a month but its quite cheap with Gandi. 

I'm not the person to ask though. 

[Caravan Monster]

I ended up going with Siteground in the end £5 / month including domain name and SSL certificate. It's got a weird replacement for cpanel but does everything automatically. It's only got to generate one job to pay for itself, waiting for the Google verification code so it will be accepted by the evil empire and start showing up in search results. Siteground is probably a good option for beginners such as myself relying on guessing + searching the web. Still quite surprised I managed to make a static page just using the W3 tutorials that works fine on mobile devices and gets decent results with the varvy.com SEO tool. Overall a good solution for a small local business that only needs to say 'this is what I do, phone this number'.

[spunko]

48 minutes ago, eek said:

Here is someone using Google's firebase to host their wordpress site

https://saadhamid.me/2020/06/13/moving-wordpress-from-shared-hosting-to-firebase/

Downside is it's google.

Upsides are it's free and on google's servers so probably very good for SEO factors.

Not in a million fucking years would I host my websites with Google.

WordPress is a piece of piss to install, in 2 commands:

wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee4 && sudo bash ee

sudo ee site create example.com --type=wp

 

Takes 30s, and installs docker, nginx, phpmyadmin and others.