Free Static Site Generator Tools and Hosting
With the growth of the JAMstack and its community, Static Site Generators are becoming more and more popular. In this article, let's take a look at the top Static site generator tools and Where to host these websites.
What is a Static website?
There is a common myth about static websites that it’s a new technology. Static sites have been with us for ages, and they are the original way of web development. Early developers used vanilla HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to build a website with no libraries, plugins, or frameworks.
Simply put, content on a static website remains the same after every visit, unlike dynamic where it changes. Your server generates these static files and returns it to the browsers. These websites can fetch data from almost anywhere, including APIs, CMS, and other content files.
As a result, it helps you bid goodbye to longer load times and annoying delays. Hence, developers can create fast, reliable, SEO-friendly and efficient applications to offer great users experience with less development time.
Why Static Site Generators?
1. Speed 🚀 As there are no back-end systems, client-server requests, nor database queries involved in delivering a static website, it exhibits blazing-fast performance with its servers always ready with HTML outputs. Besides, it can include a caching feature to eliminate delays.
2. Security 🛡️ With no database to exploit, no ground for unauthorized access, and no extensions or plugins to route into your system, static websites offer much more security than a dynamic website. Thus, you are safe from phishing campaigns, online snooping, malware, or any sort of data loss.
3. Hosting and Affordability ❤️ Basic HTML files require fewer spaces, which makes it simpler and easy for hosting these websites. You can cut down costs while channeling your resources for integrating automated builds or Git to incorporate modifications in the system.
Lets dive in.
Gatsby has made its name for itself over the past years and popular among marketers. The reason for the popularity is it’s optimized for speed. The plugin ecosystem of gatsby is one of the best in the open-source community, another reason for the developer to love it. Also, you can use gatsby to pull data from different sources, for example, CMS. Gatsby also recently released Gatsby Cloud which is advertised as "the best way to create and deploy Gatsby websites". It's worth a look if you are building Gatsby sites
Next.js is another amazing option that is built on top of React. It is also extremely popular in the community and basically the other de facto Static Site Generator that uses React. Although we are listing it as a Static Site Generator, it is important to note that that is not all it is. Next.js first and foremost supports server rendering. You also can define serverless functions as API endpoints. This gives you lots of control over how you build and deploy your Next.js applications. You can deploy your nextjs applications with single button click onto Vercel, tailor made for Nextjs applications.
Jekyll is another extremely popular option, and it is built with Ruby. Jekyll is one of the oldest static site generators but is still under active development, and its popularity largely sparked the flood of SSG innovation that has produced everything else in this list. Also, GitHub pages are powered by Jekyll so it’s free for you to deploy your site on GitHub. Moreover, it comes with a wide range of plugins, so you can easily add extra features to your site.
Nuxt.js is an intuitive VueJS framework that keeps user experience and site performance in its focus. This static site generator builds with modularity at the core. Nuxt.js support server rendering just like NextJS, with statically generated content. This ever-growing community supports automatic code-splitting and PWA support. It offers descriptive error messages and powerful defaults to keep your development smooth and fast.
Hugo:
Hugo is one of the fastest and popular static site generators that doesn’t cover the Java language. Basically, Hugo built with Go an open-source language created by Google. This open-source language isn’t as popular as JavaScript but many developers are embracing it. Also, Hugo comes with a range of built-in templates that help get up and run fast. It takes less than a second to build a site with Hugo. Moreover, it is a framework free so you can use the templating engine of your choice.
Hosting:
There are plenty of great hosting solutions out there to help simplify the process. Deploying a modern static site has become extremely fast, easy, and completely free! Best of all, these solutions all have caching and a content delivery network (CDN) built in for optimal performance.
What makes these hosting platforms even better is all of them supports popular revision control systems like GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket etc. All you need to do is connect your github account, select the repo and done. Some platforms offers preview deployments as well, like in Vercel or Netlify where it will deploy code whenever you commit changes to github. You can preview the application for that commit and you can chose to proceed with Production OR simply ignore it.
With Netlify, you can publish web projects from Git repositories without complex setups and server maintenance. Automate your processes by using its CI/CD pipeline. You can even preview the entire site to see how your website looks like before publishing it.
Netlify is Trusted by the likes of Facebook, Citrix, Verizon, Peloton, and Kubernetes, Netlify leverages serverless functions and continuous deployment to deliver sites up to 10 times faster than other configurations. Deploy your static website on its global and multi-cloud CDN – Edge, which is designed for optimizing the performance. Netlify supports a multitude of third-party applications and tools, including add-ons such as Analytics, Identity, Forms, and Fauna database.
Utilize the automated workflow by Netlify to simplify everything through Atomic deployments, unlimited rollbacks and snapshots, cache invalidation, custom headers, DNS management, redirect, and proxy rules.
Features: Unlimited websites, 300 build min/month, 125k per site /month serverless functions, free SSL, custom domain setup and sub-domain on netlify.app
Vercel is the optimal workflow for frontend teams, All-in-one: Static and Jamstack deployment, Serverless Functions, and Global CDN, Vercel promises a scalable, fast and simple static sites deployment, all you need to do Is push your codes to git and your site will be live. Vercel can be great alternative to Nelify, works with all frontend frameworks and static sites generators.
Features: Unlimited websites, custom domain setup, sub-domain with vercel.app and free SSL.
Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, they offer a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git. You can host many different frameworks of application like Rust, Go, PHP, Ruby, JamStacks, Node, Python, Ruby and Docker Containers.
Features: Continuous deployments with Git, 100 GB/month bandwidth included, Custom domains with fully managed SSL etc.
AWS S3: Amazon S3 includes straightforward management features to let you organize and configure data. It is designed to provide high durability and data storage for an enormous number of applications. Amazon S3 can create object copies, offers affordable storage classes, possesses audit capabilities, and maintains tight security with its S3 Block Public Access and compliance programs like PCI-DSS, HITECH/HIPAA, FISMA, etc.
GitHub Pages are great because they allow you to host your site directly from a GitHub repository. Once the initial setup is complete, you can quickly deploy every time you commit changes to your repository. You'll choose to publish on GitHub Pages with either a User Site or a Project Site. With a User Site, you just need to create a new repository using your username. The repo name should be: username.github.ioAdding a custom domain is easy; you just have to include a CNAM file into your account.
There are other alternatives like Firebase hosting, GitLab, surge.sh and Heroku which has great features.
Conclusion
In this blog post, I have tried to put useful one for everyone, if you think there are better ones out there please let me know I will try to update the post. If this was helpful to you, Please Like and Share so that it reaches others as well.
