Web hosts that let you submit code and don't charge too much (or nothing)

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CrazedNerd

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Not sure if this is the correct place to post this discussion, but i've wanted to put up a website and code it myself for longer than a year. It wouldn't be anything requiring back-end, it's just an essay. If I really wanted to have fun, I could run my own server...however, i only have access to wireless internet, and a lot of infrastructure is just too costly for little ol' me.

Which web hosts allow you to submit your own pages and either charge you nothing OR charge you very little? Name cheap seemed pretty appealing, because you could host a couple of goofy sites for less than $10 a month, what are your thoughts on this? Sadly most web hosting just seems geared towards running businesses...i don't have anything against those who run businesses, but this seems to be the biggest problem with the internet.
 


CrazedNerd said:
Not sure if this is the correct place to post this discussion, but i've wanted to put up a website and code it myself for longer than a year. It wouldn't be anything requiring back-end, it's just an essay. If I really wanted to have fun, I could run my own server...however, i only have access to wireless internet, and a lot of infrastructure is just too costly for little ol' me.

Which web hosts allow you to submit your own pages and either charge you nothing OR charge you very little? Name cheap seemed pretty appealing, because you could host a couple of goofy sites for less than $10 a month, what are your thoughts on this? Sadly most web hosting just seems geared towards running businesses...i don't have anything against those who run businesses, but this seems to be the biggest problem with the internet.
Click to expand...
https://pages.github.com/
 
Just rent a vps and install any distribution you want on it and code on that, then you can host it yourself as well if you want to code a website or other web-application.
 
just to make myself clear: i want to host an easy domain name, this isn't a project geared towards computer folks.

i might just plop this on wordpress and not use code, just because it's free and hardly anyone's going to read it anyways. It does seem to fit with the blogosphere better.
 
What exactly are you wanting to do because I'm confused of what you are actually wanting?
 
With github pages, as @BoringZombie recommended, you can have your own domain and have a 100% static site up and running. This is how I have https://gvisoc.com: GitHub pages + Domain. The only cost is the domain registration / renovation, as for each GitHub account you have 1 GithHub pages site for free.

And if you want to have a .github.io domain, the cost is zero.

GitLab also has its own pages https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/
 
gvisoc said:
This is how I have https://gvisoc.com: GitHub pages + Domain. The only cost is the domain registration / renovation, as for each GitHub account you have 1 GithHub pages site for free.
Click to expand...
Interesting! How do you configure github to listen to the domain you have configured in the dns of your domain, is there e a setting for that within github?
 
gvisoc said:
With github pages, as @BoringZombie recommended, you can have your own domain and have a 100% static site up and running. This is how I have https://gvisoc.com: GitHub pages + Domain. The only cost is the domain registration / renovation, as for each GitHub account you have 1 GithHub pages site for free.

And if you want to have a .github.io domain, the cost is zero.

GitLab also has its own pages https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/
Click to expand...
what's the cost of the domain through them?
 
f33dm3bits said:
What exactly are you wanting to do because I'm confused of what you are actually wanting?
Click to expand...
I just want a web page that is programmed artistically with HTML/CSS, some say those are not programming languages but WHATEVER. It's just a short essay.
 
Do you mean a web hosting company like I have in my signature?
 
f33dm3bits said:
Interesting! How do you configure github to listen to the domain you have configured in the dns of your domain, is there e a setting for that within github?
Click to expand...
Domain provider:
  1. You just need to set up your CNAME and A entries in yourn DNS pannel, as with any other hosting provider. You can check the IP addresses of GitHub pages in their help in step 5 here.
  2. Set up your Let's Encrypt certificate, and your HTTPS-only (-forced) policies
GitHub Pages:
  • Set up a CNAME file at the top level directory. As the only content for it, your domain.
  • Also, set up your domain name in the repository settings as told in their help.
My repo is public so you can check its content here, and the CNAME file here.
 
CrazedNerd said:
what's the cost of the domain through them?
Click to expand...
They don't register domains.

I personally use Cloudflare, that only charge the ICANN fee. Before they only accepted transfers, so I can only speak for the renewal process (the renewal fee is less than US $9/year for a .com) but now you can register with them. I think I checked the other day and the register fee was about US $8.60.
 
gvisoc said:
They don't register domains.

I personally use Cloudflare, that only charge the ICANN fee. Before they only accepted transfers, so I can only speak for the renewal price (less than US $9 for a .com) but now you can register with them. I think I checked the other day and the fee was about US $8.60.
Click to expand...
Ah, so that's what you pay a year? No excuse not to have a website then...this will be interesting.
 
I host sites for a fairly small number of people. It's full-fledged hosting, with tons of features. You'd need your own domain name, and there are many registrars out there to pick from. There are free domains available from 'freenom', but those don't do so great with search engines and everyone on the planet will kick your emails to the curb - rightfully so as the majority of traffic from those domains is junk traffic. But, it's fine to play around with. My linux-tips site was a .gq domain at first, but then I got more serious about the project.

If the price is just more than you can afford, just lemme know. We'll figure something out. The link posted by @gvisoc is indeed one of the links.
 
I've been wondering two things:

-Is it just a matter of linking files you put in the github repository to a domain name through the DNS? I'm a little confused how a file you'd put on there would cause someone to put in the URL of your choice and be directed to it.

-if you have a github repository, can it be private? I'm only asking this because i would like to keep personal information from being revealed such as real name, email address, etc. I just want the page to be visible to the internet.
 
I'm not sure what you're asking - with the whole GitHub thing.

In my case, you have x-amount of space and put your files into a directory called public_html (which can have sub-folders, of course) and, by default the system shows first the index.html and then index.php if index.html doesn't exist.

The pages are in HTML which you write yourself, or using an editor such as a WYSIWYG editor. However, there are far easier ways to generate webpages than to sit and type 'em out in your favorite text editor. You can install stuff like WordPress which, for all the bad press, runs a giant chunk of the public facing internet.

You can install forum software, metrics are gathered automatically but you can even install fancier stuff. You can use Perl, you can play with Ruby, NODE.js, or even Python. (Don't ask me how, follow the online tutorials).

That's assuming you have real web hosting and not GIthub.

Then, you invest 200 hours building your site and get excited when someone visits. You keep tweaking until it's just right. You pour over logs trying to find ways to optimize the site. You sign up for stuff like Google Analytics to get an even greater understanding of what your now 3 visitors are doing. You realize you want to monitor uptime, so you find a service to do that - even though you can't do anything more than email me to tell me there's an outage and I actually already know 'cause I too monitor uptime...

Eventually, you get frustrated and no longer post updates because screw those people for not visiting your site, signing up for your newsletter, and making your stats climb higher. The traffic you do see? Well, it's from bots mostly. They're looking to add spam to your site or they're looking to exploit it so that they can use it for malvertising or just a spam relay.

So, you learn a bit about security and you eventually manage to keep it secure but you still have no traffic and you're 1500 hours into a project that has paid a total of $2.35 in Google Ads.

Sometimes, you get lucky - and you get a ton of traffic. You'll still never come close to recouping the hours invested - but you do get a bunch of traffic and attention and that's reward enough.

Yeah, that's pretty much what owning a site is all about. Most sites get pretty much no traffic. It's a small number that get the overwhelming majority of traffic.
 
KGIII said:
I'm not sure what you're asking - with the whole GitHub thing.

In my case, you have x-amount of space and put your files into a directory called public_html (which can have sub-folders, of course) and, by default the system shows first the index.html and then index.php if index.html doesn't exist.

The pages are in HTML which you write yourself, or using an editor such as a WYSIWYG editor. However, there are far easier ways to generate webpages than to sit and type 'em out in your favorite text editor. You can install stuff like WordPress which, for all the bad press, runs a giant chunk of the public facing internet.
Click to expand...
Actually that whole thing you posted clarifies some things for me, but to further explain my questions and intentions...so if someone types or fallows a google result to your site, you have to buy a domain name and the Domain Name Sytem links the URL to the website, i was wondering if https://gvisoc.com just has that link matched to the pages on a github repository, and i was wondering if you can have a repository that isn't visible to other users and the web in order to protect your personal information.

I was just going to make a very simple page, and i guess i was also wondering how even someone could hack that for spam, an HTML page that's protected by a web host's standard security...but maybe i'll just make the page with HTML, just as an experiment and then use WordPress as a free host with a subdomain with their standard no-brainer CMS...i wish there was an explanation for how you could do all this yourself though, i've been scouring the web over the past couple years for straightforward explanations and i couldn't find anything, i'm obviously not using the right terms lol.
 
All right, I'll detail a bit how GitHub pages work.

GitHub is a git provider that offers a bit more on project and documentation management. They have built CI/CD pipelines and runtime environments that can fetch content from your repositories, and do things with them. In most cases, you want the previous tools to be able to build your software, run tests, Q&A processes, and deploy them in somewhere like AWS or Heroku --just examples.

One particular CI/CD+Runtime Environments that GitHub (and GitLab) offer for free, is the one they call pages (check this link). It consists on a process that fetches the static web content found in a specific repository (has to have a specific name and options checked), and deploy it to a plain web server. That means, linking to @KGIII's post, that github will take your content and place in a /public_html/ directory somewhere, for you, and make it available on the internet.

It works as follows:
  • You create a github repository a name consisting in your username dot github.io (e.g.: gvisoc.github.io)
  • You follow the set up documentation for GitHub pages to configure that repo.
If you do everything in their documentation up to this point, if you commit and push CSS, Javascript and HTML files (and pictures... any kind of static web content) on to the github pages enabled repository, it will end up available under https://<your github username>.github.io

Second part: set up your custom domain. This one is also documented, and what you're doing is basically tell the DNS system that yourdomain(.)com points to the pages hosted in a github server. You need also to set up some options and a CNAME file on your repository for github to be able to redirect to yourdomain(.)com just in case someone had linked content under https://<your github username>.github.io

You don't need to put your personal information in the GitHub repository you push your pages to, neither your real name, nor your email, or anything else. Just plain web content. A Github repo is not your whole GitHub account, just a git repository within it. Within your GitHub account, you have plenty of privacy options. I have some contact email (for comments) and my name on my https://gvisoc.com because I chose to, not because I was following any rule.
 
gvisoc said:
All right, I'll detail a bit how GitHub pages work.

GitHub is a git provider that offers a bit more on project and documentation management. They have built CI/CD pipelines and runtime environments that can fetch content from your repositories, and do things with them. In most cases, you want the previous tools to be able to build your software, run tests, Q&A processes, and deploy them in somewhere like AWS or Heroku --just examples.

One particular CI/CD+Runtime Environments that GitHub (and GitLab) offer for free, is the one they call pages (check this link). It consists on a process that fetches the static web content found in a specific repository (has to have a specific name and options checked), and deploy it to a plain web server. That means, linking to @KGIII's post, that github will take your content and place in a /public_html/ directory somewhere, for you, and make it available on the internet.

It works as follows:
  • You create a github repository a name consisting in your username dot github.io (e.g.: gvisoc.github.io)
  • You follow the set up documentation for GitHub pages to configure that repo.
If you do everything in their documentation up to this point, if you commit and push CSS, Javascript and HTML files (and pictures... any kind of static web content) on to the github pages enabled repository, it will end up available under https://<your github username>.github.io

Second part: set up your custom domain. This one is also documented, and what you're doing is basically tell the DNS system that yourdomain(.)com points to the pages hosted in a github server. You need also to set up some options and a CNAME file on your repository for github to be able to redirect to yourdomain(.)com just in case someone had linked content under https://<your github username>.github.io

You don't need to put your personal information in the GitHub repository you push your pages to, neither your real name, nor your email, or anything else. Just plain web content. A Github repo is not your whole GitHub account, just a git repository within it. Within your GitHub account, you have plenty of privacy options. I have some contact email (for comments) and my name on my https://gvisoc.com because I chose to, not because I was following any rule.
Click to expand...
I personally want to have a simple url like https://gvisoc.com, so that URL is just linked to files you have on your github repository? If so then i'll just do that, sounds very easy and not intimidating. I actually want to make a javascript HTML/CSS video game version of a c++ game i made a while ago, the javascript would be necessary for memory/values i would think. However, what i've been talking about it unrelated to that and bare html/css would be adequate, i just think it would fun to run my own code.

and your site content is interesting i'll read more of it when i get back from my trip i'm taking tomorrow.

It's a relief that you don't have to expose any personal information on the github repository...i get worried about someone being able to hit a few windows commands and see my name and email address etc, a lot of people prefer to have a server email address [[email protected]] but that's not what i'm interested in here, i don't want an email associated with this.
 
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