The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.
Cunningham’s Law
In my previous article, Quick and dirty static sites, I proposed that the quickest, dirtiest way to get a site up and running is to use AWS S3.
I stand corrected.
Since writing this article, I’ve been inundated with alternate options for super-simple static hosting. Some of these I’ve been meaning to try out for a while now. Others I’ve never heard of.
I took the time to evaluate each service. Ideally, a static hosting service for a quick and dirty site should be flexible enough to accommodate a simple directory of files, no need for a container, SSL out of the box, deploy from either the terminal or a GUI, and have the option for a custom subdomain. Here’s how everything breaks down.
Netlify was far-and-away the winner in this review, with Surge a close second, if you want to keep everything on the command line.
Netlify
I’ve never seen anything as immediate and simple as deploying with Netlify. You can literally drag a folder into your browser window and deploy to a CDN-backed, SSL-enabled, custom subdomain URL in seconds. And if you want to deploy from the command line, you have this one-liner:
netlify deploySurge
Similarly, deploying with Surge will take you six clicks of your keyboard:
surgeWhat a time to be alive!
I appreciate the fact that you can manage all your sites through the Netlify dashboard. And using Surge reminds me of ngrok in its utter simplicity.
So the next time you need a quick and dirty static website up and running in seconds, try out one of these amazing solutions. And a big thanks to the Hacker News community, and Kevin and Scott from the Serial Maker community for pointing me to all these incredible services.
Thanks for reading!