How to host a drop-dead simple website

Ok, 2018. All the big problems have already been solved and there are indeed some magical solutions around for us, developers. If you havent come across it yet, meet Netlify

What's Netlify?

Man, as simple as that: it's a free (yes!) web hosting platform for static websites. Pay attention: static websites. Only HTML, CSS and JS here, folks. No fancy DB, anything.

But hey! All the funcionalities are usually on the backend API's only, right? So the website is great for that Single Page Application you're developing using React.js only (you actually don't really need Node

Ok, how do I start?

Head to their page, sign up and... yeah, drag and drop a folder from your computer to their site. That's, yes, not sustainable in the long run but it's just amazing how it simply works. In one minute or two you have a server up and runnning for you. It's perfect for quick prototypes

Is it sustainable in the long run?

Absolutely. Netlify was built thinking about websites and webdevelopers today. It integrates beautifully with Github, has an amazing support for POST form submissions (they email the content of any form in your website for you, no database required - just add the attribute "netlify" to your form tag)

Like this:

<form name="contact-me" method="POST" netlify>
...
</form>

Amazing, right? I loved this when I first saw it actually working

Do give it a try!

Really, guys. It's a brilliant tool, that allows you to put that simple page up and running in no time. Or that complex static website where maybe a CM is not needed. Or that single page app whose front end is so simple and all the complexity is on the API calls.