Static Website Hosting

While I was coming up to speed on static website hosting and the JAMStack approach, I captured my learnings and my research into which features are available at the most popular static web site hosting providers.

This post covers the modern static site hosting resurgence, why it's compelling, and which hosting providers there are and their feature sets.

Static Website

What is a static website?
It's a website that does not change.
The end user's browser will be requesting and receiving the same data everytime for every user.
This does not mean it's a bad site per se. Many sites that are incredibly rich and entertaining can meet this definition.

Github for storage and CDN for delivery equals cheap cheap cheap

The static website has become a commodity (and this is a good thing).

A static website can be sourced from a github repository and then deployed to a CDN centric hosting platform.
CDNs have become common place (think Akamai, CloudFlare, Amazon Cloudfront).
The combination of dispensing with web assets on disk (supplanted by github) and then using Serverless to prime the CDN allows the large web hosting companies to offer a free or near free tier for static web hosting.

This is great news for the consumer!

Traditional Limitations of Static Web Sites

Because it's well, static, there are some things that have historically just not been possible.

This list includes:

• Authentication.
  The ability of some user to be able to auth and then see privileged pages
• Personalized Experiences
• Content Management
  (This goes hand in hand with authentication: the ability for some end users to be able to modify the webpage itself. These functions typically come from a CMS [Content Management System])
• Database integration
  

Compensating with APIs and Serverless

Static webpages have been around since the web began, but they are having a renaissance because of their compatibility with CDNs (Content Delivery System).
Also their limitations are now being somewhat addressed by Cloud Provider functions.

There are now many Cloud provided and third party services that can used in a static site including:

• Form Handling
• Headless CMS
• Authentication
• Payment Processing
• Social Media

Enter the JAMStack

So what to call all this? Well, most folks in the industry refer to it as JAMStack.

• Javascript
• APIs
• Markup

What is JAMStack?

It's basically what we've been talking about. It's a static website that can be pleasing visually (b/c Javascript), can integrate with third party services when needed (b/c Javascript) but can still be hosted extremely cheaply with excellent performance and ability to scale.

This has also been refered to as the "Composable Web" (doesn't really snap like 'JAMstack' does it?).

JAMStack Hosting

Several hosting companies have gone all in on this approach: offering platforms to provide these functions and cater to consumers looking for JAMStack options.
The below hosting companies in particulare have all leveraged serverless functions and CDNs to offer a curated static website delivery model:

• Netlify
• Vercel
• AWS Amplify
• Cloud Flare

Netlify

https://www.netlify.com/

Netlify pioneered the JAMstack approach and they are the dominant player here.

Some really big PROs of Netlify:

• They allow commercial websites to host for free
• They have a built in form management addon

An area of concern w/ Netlify:

• There have been instances of customers receiving huge bandwidth bills if something goes viral or a DDOS attack occurs

Vercel

https://vercel.com/

Vercel is the next biggest player in the JAMStack/'Composable Web' Space after Netlify.
Vercel is notable as the creator and maintainer of Next.js. Their platform is more geared to devs.

Pros

• you can put a spend cap on your site to keep from getting an outrageous bill from a DDOS attack

AWS Amplify

https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/

Looks solid. It's hard to go wrong w/ AWS.

Cloudflare Pages

https://pages.cloudflare.com/

Cloudflare also looks quite solid. Consensus is that you will almost never outgrow them.
They are also moving fast and are pressuring Vercel with incredibly cheap hosting rates (FREE) and with support for the OpenNext framework to remove the alleged lockin that Vercel has with Next.js hosting.

Side by Side

* Vercel will only host commercial w/ $20 a month
**AWS looks like it will be so cheap it might as well be considered free

The Winner

It's a bit of a tossup.
I've done a bit with AWS Amplify and that has been fine.
But I really want to work more with Headless CMS. That narrows it down to Netlify or Vercel.
When I consider that Netlify is also just fine with commercial use of their free tier then Netlify is the Winner.