How to Host Static Sites for Free with an Automated Pipeline

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-host-static-sites-for-free-with-an-automated-pipeline/?utm_source=rss

Did you know that you can host static sites for free on a number of high-grade services? This doesn’t just save money, but also means you’re deploying to globally distributed CDNs and automating processes.

Provided: Netlify

In a previous article, we reviewed 100 Jamstack tools, APIs and services to power your sites, which included a lot of hosting services.

In this article, we’ll get hands-on and show you how to host static sites with an automated pipeline for deployment.

Does this sound complicated? It’s easier than you’d think.

Free Cloud Hosting, but with Strings Attached

You can actually host websites for free — even dynamic ones — with the AWS Free Tier (Amazon Web Services), the GCP Free Tier (Google Cloud Platform) and Windows Azure (with some workarounds).

But when you go to give that a try, you’ll come across a number of conditions, fine print considerations, and implementation constraints:

how much computing power do you need?
your credit card number, please?
where do you want to deploy to?
is your account brand new?
and not older than 1 year?
actually, what services?

Often this is more a tryout than an actual freebie (hence the reason why AWS Amplify Storage is not included in this list). And while some power users might take advantage of the goodies, if you aren’t well acquainted with these platforms beforehand, you’ll find out that the learning curve to start using these services is very steep, and that for every cloud service you intend to use you’ll need to find out first in which way each provider reinvented the wheel before you can actually spin it into any free deployment.

Let’s see now how a handful of smaller players rose to prominence with free hosting services that aren’t a hassle to implement and have fewer strings attached.

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How to Host Static Sites for Free with an Automated Pipeline
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