Micro.blog hivemind: I need to find a free or cheap place to host adinkra.org.
It’s still a top resource on the web, but I haven’t updated for over a decade. I want to continue to offer it but I am paying too much to Dreamhost to keep it there. All static pages, ftr.
@johnbrayton @AngeloStavrow I'm not much of a GitHub user. I did have a quick look at the description of how to use this, and I was 🤯. I understood how to create a repository and pages, but it sounds like I would have to create each page of the site? That amount of work would negate the Dreamhost savings.
@hjertnes I don't want to recreate everything from scratch. I want to move the current pages to a new location. Do you think GitHub will do that?
@hjertnes @johnbrayton @AngeloStavrow Details that might be helpful: the site has 109 HTML files and 431 image files. I don't really know how to do anything in GitHub except create Gists and look at other people's projects.
@macgenie I don’t think you have to do anything except copying the files from dreamhost to a github pages repository
@hjertnes Thanks! If that's a possibility, I'll do a little more research. The help isn't really designed for someone who isn't versed in GitHub, which is understandable.
@macgenie The trick is you have to add all the web site files to your git repository. After creating a git repository through the web site, there is an “Upload Files” button. It looks like you can drag and drop files and folders from your computer into the browser view, and it will upload them.
@macgenie Hey there, try out linode.com because they have a pay-as-you-go/pay-for-only-what-you-need approach, and they’re highly rated. Try this link for a promo offer (not mine, but a podcast I listen to called The Talk Show)
If, for some reason, that link doesn’t work, Linode.com will do just fine. 😀 Basic hosting with high bandwidth is only $5 a month.
@macgenie Hmmm... I'm not really up on hosting options these days. I do know my email service, Fastmail, also lets you host relatively simple static websites. If by chance you use Fastmail for your email that might be an option. I'll ask around among my friends too.
@macgenie git and GitHub are developer tools and the documentation is made for us developers. Github has a Mac app you can use to do all the “git stuff”. It should just be to create the repository, clone the repository to your machine copy over the file commit them and push it back to GitHub and then test it + reading in the documentation on how to point the domain to GitHub pages
@macgenie This might work: reclaimhosting.com aimed at students and academics hence the low price, but you are a student in a language course.
@jgmac1106 recommended them to me.
@DrOct That’s interesting because one of my Someday projects is to move my main domain email from Google to Fastmail. This would be a bonus!
@macgenie Well if/when you decide to do it I wrote up several blog posts about my experience doing just that! (and I'd be happy to answer specific questions too of course)
@macgenie Nearly Free Speech is also a good possibility. Another relatively simple, pay-what-you-use option
@macgenie Not sure. Unless the existing design can be recreated in whatever the templates are designed in (Mustache?). Best answered by David at @Blot
@macgenie What a great site, and hooray to you for keeping it going after all these years.
I sense you and I are on the other side of a generation gap here, where the simple, inexpensive hosting today is geared towards (and documented for) modern-day webdevs with templated static-site generators, and setups that allow hand-crafted static HTML sites like we built (I can see the temporal and “thematic”—for lack of a better word—connection between adinkra.org and al-Qāhira fī Amrīkā and other things like Ron’s Dylan Bibliography site) are geared towards whole-kit-and-kaboodle hosting like Dreamhost :-(
Are you willing to trade a little bit of time learning git (or GitHub Desktop, or the GitHub website) for free hosting? A quick web search revealed some useful actual tutorials for setting a site up with GitHub Pages, all except for the “use my domain” part :-( (I’d looked into that part a year or so ago, and all the GitHub docs I found assumed I was a GitHub whiz to start :-P ). It sounds like there are definitely people here who can help you decipher the GH jargon to get it configured correctly, and the basic git commands are easy enough to learn (as a plus, you could go wild in the Micro.blog Help docs then ;-) ).
Otherwise, a low-cost, more traditional plan that offers good ol’ FTP (or its secure successor) seems like the best option. How much bandwidth does adinkra.org use each month—you mentioned it was a top resource—so that may come into play with something like nearlyfreespeech.net that @aclaman mentioned (one of our Camino devs also used it).
@macgenie I host something similar but smaller, created entirely in BBEdit as static HTML, and use Linode. I use the $10/month plan and had it set it up with Ubuntu and nginx. It's not as easy as Dreamhost but it's not too horrible, and they have good help files.
@macgenie if it’s static only and you don’t want anything fancy, you should be able to do it via Netlify.
They allow drag and drop deploys without having to learn git.
Feel free to email me and we can give it a try at least.
Netlify is free, for what you need. Been using them for a while!
@macgenie if you want to go the github route, let me know. We can video conf together and set it up for you.
@macgenie Yeah, there should be something in your site dashboard or control panel at Dreamhost for bandwidth or site traffic, hopefully showing at least three months’ worth of stats, to account for monthly or seasonal fluctuation.
(I checked the info at my host recently and was shocked to see I had been running between about 5 and 9 GB each month the last few months—I have been posting too many photos that the good people of Micro.blog have been looking at! 😂)
@bradenslen Another vote for reclaimhosting. I am on the $100 a year plan for a 100 gigs, but your project at $30 would be fine. You can get cheaper hosting, but I like the service and the mission
