Submitted 1 day ago by iveseenthat@reddthat.com to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Is there a good alternative to github pages? I need just a static website up.
Ok, so I must’ve misunderstood the question, because to me it seems OP already has all the necessary ingredients to bake this dish. 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.
A reverse proxy from somewhere like Cloudflare would allow you to host without any router config. Plus, it’d give a little more protection against bots, but it’s not going to block 100% of them.
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.
I think the kissing piece is the website itself? The static HTML page generator?
Something like Hugo
If you don’t care about uptime, self host it on the local machine you have and expose it through free cloudflare tunnels.
GitLab has their own version of Pages
There’s actually a surprising amount of free static website hosting out there. Besides GitHub, GitLab, Cloudflare, and Netlify come to mind offhand.
Codeberg does too
Codeberg is not just for static websites. It’s for FOSS projects. Their FAQ addresses this.
Codeberg pages
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?
Codeberg Pages. Neocities.
HTTP 1.1 is more than good enough for serving a static website.
I’m guessing you want to selfhost, rather than use a hosting service?
When you say you have your site already, do you mean it’s hosted on a local webserver, or just that you have the files?
If it’s just the files, you’ll need to choose a webserver. I like NGINX myself, but lighttpd is another option (there’s quite a few options, really, but sticking to a well known option is generally more secure).
Configuration will depend on the server you choose, but then you’ll put the files into three “root folder” used by the webserver. This isn’t the system root ( ‘/’ ), but a different folder specified as the root of your web page, usually ‘/var/www/html or /srv/www/html’.
Once the files are in place, you can test the site by using the web browser on another PC and entering the local IP address of the server. If everything looks good, you can set up port forwarding on your router to forward public port 80 to port 80 on the local server.
Lastly, you will need a DNS provider which will point your domain to the IP address of your router. Assuming you have residential service, you will need to determine whether your IP address is static or dynamic, or if your ISP is utilizing CGNAT. Depending on those factors, you may need to do some additional setup.
Once it is working, your next step will likely be to set up SSL and port forwarding on 443. That will allow your website to be accessed over https, which is the standard for the modern Internet.
I have hosted my own website and a blog for a while, and there are definitely some additional steps I would recommend to take, but the above is your basic starting point.
Hosting site in your local machine is tricky. It depends on how your ISP configured your network and most of the time you will be under CGNAT. Which means you will not have a unique public IP, but a shared one. Similarly your IP will be dynamic which will need additional configurations. Nowadays it is nearly impossible to host a site on local machine directly.
One thing you can try is Tailscale Funnel. Fair warning, bending your head around functioning of Tailscale is not trivial, and you will have to spend some time to properly understand and set it up.
If you prefer a simpler route, free hosting of a static site is your best bet.
Netlify is the go to solution if you are familiar with Git. I used to have my portfolio up there. Another option is, as you mentioned, Github Pages.
Vercel is the another common one people use. But it might be a little more tricky to get it working, because it focus on front end framework like Next.js.
Checkout Cloudflare Pages too. Very much limilar to GitHub Pages, but with the performance and reliability of Cloudflare.
Heroku is another thing people used in the past. I think the free tier got limited nowadays.
Good luck with your adventures.
It’s not “very difficult” to self host. Arguably it’s one of the easier public things to self host. Takes an inexperienced IT enthusiast maybe 2 hours to setup.
Depends on your ISP. In my case my IP hasn’t changed in the two years I’ve been with them so it was easy as setting up port forwarding in my router. Took a minute or two.
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.
I don’t want to serve my work in silver plate to theis AI.
I recently used Jekyll (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.
I love Fossil-scm. Even host my own instance with my web host. I was considering using github moving forward, but given recent events and decisions by Microsoft, I’ll be sticking with Fossil-scm.
if you've already got something at home to run it on and want it easy to set up/maintain. take a look at mkdocs.
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: geeksforgeeks.org/…/deploying-static-website-to-c…
You can keep your content on github, connect it to a CF page, and have it auto-update on push to github.
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.
If you want free static hosting then probably: https://wasmer.io/
If you have the machine at home then you could set up port forwarding to it, but you would need to do everything yourself like:
- running a web server like nginx
- setting up ssl for it with certbot
- storing the static files in /var/www/html for example
- port forwarding from your router to that machine
- using some service like DuckDNS to point a domain to your dynamic IP at home
- pointing a CNAME to the DuckDNS subdomain on your domain
You could port forward.
However, I’d buy a digital droplet for 10 USD a month, point the A record of the domain to that and then use Caddy to implement SSL.
Caddy can run a http server or reverse proxy something on localhost.
$10/month just for a static website is a lot, especially with free alternatives out there.
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.
You may look at SDF.org they provide shell accounts and hosting.
I built this for my personal use: https://git.prisma.moe/aichan/simple_web_editor
Neocities?
I also thought about it, but the custom domain feature only works on the $5 / month plan.
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.
I think vercel (formerly zeit.co) has a free tier for static websites.
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.
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?
foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
If it’s purely static without the need to generate generate easily new page, simply use a web server.