https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12401849
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13021722
https://onesite.website/?source=HackerNews
Now we've got a site, we want to host it which means we need to transfer all our files to a server running live on the internet.
We could Set Up a Web Server at Home but that's probably not going to be a reliable and robust solution - there's a reason most people don't run their own web servers.
In the old days, choice was limited and most hosts worked in the same way. You needed to use a different protocol - ftp - to get your files onto your web sevrer.
This kind of service - a plain old host - still exists and for completeness, we'll look into this option.
Once your files are uploaded, you need a way to manage them on the remote server and to configure the server itself.
The most popular way to administer these sites was cPanel. You can search for cPanel hosting to find a provider. But again, I stress, this is probably not what you want to do so just keep reading for now.
Some hosts give you what's called 'shell access'
This kind of hosting has evolved into VPS and you can do that too.
You could rent a VPS and run your own server by installing software.
The only reason you would do that, today, though is if you want to run server software - for a static site, there aren't many reasons you'd want to do that.
SO - ftp host. I haven't used one for a long time. There are many many options.
We could just pick one out of thin air. But what I like to do is consult hacker news
The users there tend to be quite honest in saying when something doesn't measure up.
search for ftp hosting site:nes.ycombinator.com
Now peruse the threads.
Hmmm.... So, that's a bit of a pain, right?
Every time we update our site and want to deploy the changes, we need to go through all of those steps.
If we were stuck with this method of deployment, we would have to try and automate this workflow in some way - probably by writing shell scripts to lauch and manage the ftp uplaods.
Thankfully, we don't have to do that now - we have much better options for deploying static sites.
The simplest way is to use a web interface.
Doing it this way is friendly and simple.
Use Neocities web interface.
Then there's WebDAV - that gives you a simple way to map your piece of Neocites storage to a drive on your own computer and then managing your online files is as easy as updating the files in your own local folder and waiting for the sync to take place.
Good, but not there yet.
We've already got our files under version control with Git. If we push them up to github, github will kindly host our site for us, isn't that cool?
We get lots of benefits from doing this.
Github keeps track of the changes in our pages so when we push an update, it only needs to push the parts that have actually changed.
Github allows us to host our simple pages.
Netlify is a company that offers static hosting with lots of extra tools.
The other thing that Netlify can do is build the site for you - meaning that if you're using a static site generator you can upload just the code.
What we want to upload though is just the output.
Unless there's a way to have netlify build our project using tw?
For now, we just want to host the files.
So there are lots of options to get our site live but the last two are the one's we're interested in.
I really like Netlify because of all the little benefits it provides, but Github pages is probably just as good for what we need here.
NOW - our site is live. Let's point a proper domain at it so that people can find it.