This site used to be hosted on Fastmail, then on Netlify, and currently on Uberspace.
Requirements
Must have:
- Redirects
- Easy way of deploying (e.g. via Git)
- Canonical URLs with trailing slash
Should have:
- CDN
- Fast deploys
- Instant deploy switchover
- Minimum maintenance
- Configurable caching (e.g. for cache-busted assets)
Nice to have:
- Sustainable hosting
- EU-hosted
- Analytics
- Programmable
- Host scheduling software
- Host URL shortener (e.g. cass.run)
Fastmail web hosting evaluated
What I liked:
- Static HTML copied with
rclone
What I don’t like:
- No good redirect support. There is an admin panel, but setting up redirects there is a bit of a pain.
- No per-site logs (which I could use for analytics purposes).
- Fastmail’s WebDAV implementation does not support checksums, and files are considered changed only when their file size is different; modified files won’t be synced if their file size is exactly the same.
- Not possible to do instant deploys. This isn’t really necessary for personal web sites, but would be good to have anyway
Netlify web hosting evaluated
I use Netlify for both my personal web site and the Nanoc web site. For Nanoc, I’m letting Netlify build the entire site, though for my personal one, I’m building it locally and pushing the already-built HTML/CSS/etc files, which is not quite making good use of what Netlify can do.
What I like:
- Redirect support
- Easy to set up
- Instant switchover deploys
What I don’t like:
- Deploys are slow, even when pushing already-built sites
- Free version is limited (naturally), e.g. no analytics
Self-hosted
Advantages:
- Flexible (redirects, URL rewrites, expires headers, …)
- Relatively cheap
- Safe deployment
- Choice of green hosts
- Proper deploys possible
Disadvantages:
- More maintenance effort
- Security aspect is unclear
- Would need a separate CDN
Alternatives
-
S3
- Pro: Redirects are possible
- Pro: Fairly cheap
- Con: I have ethical objections to AWS
- Con: Lots of setup work (even though I’ve done it before)
- Con: Redirects are possible, but a bit of a pain
-
VPS
- Pro: Lots of control
- Con: So much maintenance
- Con: Need to start thinking not just about hosting
-
Shared hosting
- Pro: Could find a green/sustainable host
- Q: Which ones are good, and provide the features I want?