What are my best options for hosting a static site on Australian servers?
Previously I was using a normal web hosting service but they don’t work very well with static site generators and are usually overpriced for what I want.
Ideally I’d like a service like Cloudflare pages or GitHub pages, etc., i.e. there is good integration with git as my site is generated using Hugo.
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S3 bucket fronted by cloudfront. Egress from S3 to CF is free, from to Internet pretty cheap.
No server to manage, practically infinite scaling… for a price
Ideally I’d like a service like Cloudflare pages or GitHub pages, etc.
Out of interest, why can’t/don’t you use those? I assume you can just point a CNAME record at them if you want to use your own domain?
I think there is a legal requirement that it should be hosted in Australia as it involves children
Hmm, I’m not sure what law that is or what specific content you’re referring to, but it seems fairly counterintuitive. There’s a lot of content both featuring and targeted at children (including Australian children) on Facebook, YouTube, and other non-Australian websites.
I’m not sure about it either, but I heard about it from someone who works in school IT so I’d figure they know. There’s probably exemptions for social media, since they’re all run by large powerful offshore companies
Hmm. Could be that there are specific rules for educational institutions that require data be stored onshore. I can’t see our political landscape carving out an exemption to be friendly to social media.
Aws is pretty good for anything. Free option should serve a basic station site pretty easily.
Yeah, aws and Azure both offer spot vps’. Probably the cheapest option
I serve static content on a Quantum Core VPS. AU$5 a month. So far I cannot complain, though I am more of a self-hoster than using saas products.
EDIT: Woops thought parent said shared hosting, not VPS. I meant for Quantum’s shared hosting.
Quantum gave up on email reputation a year or so back, so make sure you’re not also wanting outgoing email for anything (alerts, logs).
Run my own email server - on same box. I don’t know much about email reputation, just know enough and lucky enough to not get my email delivered to spam folder at google mail. Given the AU$ was so weak it became cheaper to host in Au. Excluding the really cheap stuff - i.e. US$2 a month. Not concerned with server monitoring; Azure goes down more often than the cheap crap I use.
static site generators
Do you need SSH access to generate the site files on the server? Or just a method of uploading your site files after generating them locally?
Cheap shared hosts are a pain with SSH access, most will do it with a support ticket but often time limited or through an IP whitelist. A cheap VPS is really the only reliable option here.
I used to generate locally and then delete everything and then upload on the old host, which took way too long with my shitty internet connection so I moved to CloudFlare pages but would rather host in Australia - I guess if I want to automate things I could go with a VPS
Cheapest VPS I’m using in Aus so far is BinaryLane. $4.13/mon ($50/year). Seems OK, has dedicated IPV4 (yes you can get VPS behind CGnat4 + IPV6), IPV6 works after a bit of finangling. No backups. I only put it under low stress though.
Robtec does OK shared hosting (notably they offer an alternative to Cpanel) and was happy to permanently whitelist my home IP for SSH access. Quantumcore used to do this on request too but now it’s only temporary, I have to keep contacting them every 6 months or so.
then delete everything and then upload on the old host
It’s really annoying that good file transfer protocols (like rsync) also tend to require ssh access :| I wish shared hosts were a little less garbage sometimes, but I guess they have to deal with too many abusive customers for that to be cheap.
Neocities isn’t Australian but looks kind of cool. Apparently a “neocities supporter” can use rsync, here is a person doing it specifically with Hugo.
Oh hey, i use BinaryLane for a small discord bot I run. They do actually offer backups. Reasonable prices too, imo. If you want either a daily, weekly, or monthly backup only stored for the same period of time (daily backup stored for 1 day, weekly backup stored for 1 week, or monthly backup stored for 1 month), it’s $1 extra per month. Otherwise it’s an extra dollar for each extra period of time. i.e going for the monthly backup and telling them to keep a copy of it for 10 months will be 10 extra dollars per month.
You can also take a temporary snapshot for free which is stored for a week
Edit: they also offer offsite backups as well
Depends why you want to be located in Australia
- If you are worried about data sovereignty, I’m not aware of any services that are based in Australia but aren’t US or EU owned
- If you are more concerned about latency/TTFB, CloudFlare has several POPs in Australia so pages should be just as fast as anywhere else
- If you are willing to roll your own with AWS, you could set up a GitHub actions job to upload to an S3 bucket (which you can locate in ap-southeast) then serve it out of Cloudfront (AWSs edge cache service). Unless you are doing a ton of traffic it’d probably be within the free tier limit as well
If you only care about australia based for latency reasons give netlify a look.
Super easy to hook up to your git repo and will probably even detect Hugo and configure stuff automaticallyHave been really happy with it hosting a couple mostly static websites I’ve done
Binary Lane $3.75/month for a small but full access VPS. Been using them for a year or so for self-hosting and commercial workloads, no drama. They expect you to know what you’re doing - it’s just a Linux VPS with an IP address , the same as DigitalOcean Droplet, Linode etc.
