Statichost.eu – European static site hosting
statichost.euI'm using this for my mother's website (https://www.touchofglass.eu/), and my only complaint is that it assumes you version a website in a Git repository. You can work around it by uploading a tarball or something like that, but it is far less convenient than using sftp/rsync. But considering that we are far into the free 10GB a month and I only have to update it very infrequently, it seemed like the best solution.
Wow, your mom is so cool!
"Research has shown that being creative through art projects can help promote stress relief, increase self-esteem, help connect with others, and boost intrinsic motivation. So, participating in mindful art projects can open one's mind to more positive thoughts and offer alternative solutions to life problems."
And wise. Well done publishing the Web site which works without fuss in a calm way.
She is flattered :) Your comment and those of others here have "made her day", so thanks!
Btw highly recommend glass workshop like this. I did one and was surprised how easy it was to make a good looking coaster with no artistic talent.
I thought the same! :)
Love your mom’s work. Wow.
Seriously, no WebDAV?
According to the docs no, but I did find out that they now provide a script that automates the process https://www.statichost.eu/docs/direct-upload/.
WebDAV used to be a tire fire, is it not anymore? I'd probably prefer SFTP, it just works
I like sftpgo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215419
doesn't seem like a good idea
Do you mind sharing what (if anything) you're using to version that website? I'm wondering what folks use instead of git nowadays.
Back in the day people used to build a website without any versioning. Just make it and upload it. Make a change, upload it again.
Then people realized why that's such a bad idea
Why should it be? In my experience it depends on the case, and in my case it seems like an absolute technological overkill to version the site and have statichost regularly pull from some repository, as I update it perhaps once a year.
I mean, versioning is basically free from a technical / storage / time spent standpoint, and my experience says that if you don’t do it you likely will lose your code at some point
To be fair you can have versions and backups even if you don't use a versioning tool like git. Good old _v2, _v3, _v4.
Fair, but like, why??
Simpler. Or you work/collaborate on projects with people who really shouldn't have to learn Git, even via a GUI.
I'm a programmer by trade and do plenty of versioning via _v1 and so on when working on music with others, we basically send .zip files over Telegram and append some label at the end. Not gonna ask these people to learn something when basic "have many copies" does the trick sufficiently good.
If you're making static websites, there's no code to lose.
Second order code loss: make a change, realize you screwed everything up, unable to revert
Is that why even Google Docs has version control?
I use Git for version control, but not for deployment because I don’t want to bother making a commit every time I want to fix a typo.
Not really, I just use Emacs' versioned backup files that are automatically generated. As I said, I don't have to update the site that often, so it is entirely sufficient. An advantage for me, besides not having to write Git commit messages, is that I also don't have to version images in Git, which I don't like doing.
Extreeeemly capable person, your Mum! Just WOW!!!
Exquisite work. I love Point of Departure.
If you'd like an EU hosted Git Forge to back it, Codefloe offers a free built-in integration with no restriction on personal or private repositories.
Why would i use codefloe and not a more reputable non-profit provider like codeberg/disroot/framagit?
It says it's community owned, but i only see one codefloe team member on the forums and a few people (like you). I didn't find any good community rules or pricing, any political statement about the mission, etc. The only thing i found deep in the comments is that it seems to be for people who don't want FLOSS? Also the pricing mentions mixing a non-profit and a for-profit for the best of both worlds, which as Mozilla has shown is a potentially tragic strategy.
To be clear, i'm in favor of more non-profit hosts. But from reading the site i'm not convinced this one is actually for-profit, what the community stands for, and whether i'm the target audience.
Codeberg does not permit personal repos, it is strictly for open source project communities. Also, it is painfully slow if you are working in a repo of any size. Codefloe is professionally hosted on a robust platform - it could probably support about 10x the volume Codeberg has currently with good performance. I have not used the other options you mentioned but I've long admired what Framasoft is doing.
I'm not sure where you'd get the idea that Codefloe is for people who don't want FOSS. There are hundreds of open source repos. There are also a lot of personal projects, and probably some commercial ones as well.
What they don't want, is an ideology that restricts the types of projects hosted there. Its available for all software projects. Most of their user base are just using the service - and that is really the point. Similar to how most users on Lichess are there to play chess, not to talk about hosting chess servers.
They are owned by a commercial entity, devXY but they are not profit seeking. They need donations to cover costs but are willing to give that time to build up. There are some regular donors[1], but they are not yet covering all costs [2].
They publish a report every quarter where you can see usage figures.
https://codefloe.com/codefloe/analytics/src/branch/main/repo...
They also publish detailed cost analytics and donations:
[2] https://codefloe.com/codefloe/analytics/src/branch/main/repo...
Thanks for the explanation. It's more detailed than what's on the homepage.
> it could probably support about 10x the volume Codeberg has currently with good performance
I'm very curious about this statement since it seems to also be based on forgejo, and hosted by Hetzner. Maybe there's some forms of clever caching involved? That could explain why the monthly expenditures seem to be moving around so much, which is unusual. Do you have a link about it?
> an ideology that restricts the types of projects hosted there
That's precisely what people who don't want FLOSS say. I appreciate that some communities prevent others from restricting our freedoms; if that means restricting their capability to engage in harmful behavior (eg. non-free software, LLMs, scams, etc) that's a plus. But even codeberg is not that "strict".
> They are owned by a commercial entity, devXY but they are not profit seeking.
I will never trust a for-profit corporation to host my data, and even less so if it claims to not seek profit. If you don't seek profit, there is 0 reason to setup a for-profit company. And depending on your jurisdiction, it may actually be illegal for a for-profit to receive donations.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I hope to be wrong and over time codefloe becomes a flourishing community full of interesting projects and people.
> Maybe there's some forms of clever caching involved? That could explain why the monthly expenditures seem to be moving around so much, which is unusual. Do you have a link about it?
Mostly it is just better/newer hardware for the database servers - both CPU & NVME storage. But also more hosts, that are not sharing system resources, and have sub-ms latency between each other.
Yes, costs change as hardware is added. But this leads to another advantage which is hard to understate:
It is very easy for Codefloe to adapt its hosting architecture because everything is managed with infrastructure as code. So as bottlenecks are found, improvements are benchmarked, change can be deployed safely and reliably. Codeberg is much riskier to change at this point.
Some of this is public here[1] - but I don't really expect it to convince you. What should convince you, is simply using Codeberg. It feels like being on dial-up.
[1] https://pat-s.me/codefloe-launch/#takeaways-from-my-time-wit...
Thanks, that's a very good article! I don't understand why it's not set front and center on the codefloe homepage.
Forgejo user, but I do not trust Codeberg after their last "vote".
> 403 Browser Update Required Your browser is outdated. CodeFloe requires a modern browser for the best experience and security.
Site is broken on Brave.
The amount of Codeberg FUD one can encounter on HN is unreal. I'm starting to question whether there's an organized effort behind it.
Both personal and private repos are explicitly permitted in the Codeberg TOS:
> Private repositories[…] allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
As if there wasn't a massive amount of nuance between "you may keep your dotfiles private but don't upload your photo library". If their rules read this arbitrary, I wouldn't trust them to host any of my stuff, especially considering that you always have to hope they don't change their rules any further.
Assume you did some local LLM stuff in June that worked with a 200MB set of various jpegs and you wanted to keep it private: Is this still legit in September 2026? I wouldn't rely on it.
> , I wouldn't trust them to host any of my stuff, especially considering that you always have to hope they don't change their rules any further.
Yeah, I think this is a win-win for both parties.
You strike me as someone who would "ride along the lines of the terms of service" basically, and you'll see anything not explicitly forbidden as being allowed essentially.
While Codeberg is a project driven by humans, with human reactions to what's happening. If you're not comfortable with rules not being 100% defined, and requiring a humans value judgement to be had to figure out if the rule is broken or not, I don't think Codeberg is for you.
The rest of us, who are OK with humans making decisions rather than just going by what's written in rules, are fine with this, because we know our private repositories won't be deleted. And if they are, you'll be able to speak with a human to explain, and if your intention is fine and good, they'll be OK with it. But if you try to argue about some "That wasn't explicitly stated", then yeah, they'll probably get tired of you quickly.
Think your participating in your local user group vs some corporate/government forum, the rules will be enforced differently.
> "ride along the terms of service"
By using AI to write code, like virtually everyone does? Tell me, what indication was there in their TOS, that this might be close to a line?
Do X in whatever way you want, if you do so knowing it's against the terms of service, you're "riding along the line of the terms of service" for sure if you try to explain away how it is/isn't explicitly forbidden.
Using AI was not against any terms of service at all three months ago.
No, it was just against every value Codeberg ever stood for, and against the value humanity should stand for. There was no ambiguity ever about this. There is no moral ambiguity that if people develop military FLOSS on codeberg they will be banned, even though it's not in the ToS right now, because that's the right thing to do and the community will reach a consensus that we want to support human communities, not military organisations who destroy them.
The rules say nothing about military AI and currently include selfhosted LLMs as well:
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
At least stick with the truth before launching with "the right the to do" (which is also a pretty bad rule because it's completely ambiguous.)
I'm fine with ambiguous rules. A non-profit is not a legislative body, though to be fair even actual laws are usually ambiguous and contradictory and that's why we have lawyers and judges and such.
Ambiguous rules with clear objectives is what gives a non-profit the power to be flexible in the way to accomplish common goals. It's based on human trust and is fine by me and others. If you ever were part of a non-profit, you know human trust is an essential component.
I was (4 years) and we made sure our rules were easy to grasp and follow to ensure we wouldn't have to deal with lack of clarity and enforcement.
Ok, point being? Codeberg is a non-profit community that evolves and figures out where to move, all the time, this is the point of the association itself. Members discuss what to do, then a decision is made, then new rules eventually apply, this is how the project moves forward.
You said people were “riding the line”. They weren’t. Codeberg made up a rule that excluded eligibility for projects they were already hosting. Projects that were not illegal, indecent or dangerous. I can’t think of another time something like that has happened. They can do it, sure, but many had hoped they could be an independent host for all FOSS as GitHub deteriorates. They have disappointed those hopes, and we will have to look to others - like Codefloe - to carry that hope forward.
GitHub is deteriorating primarily because of LLMs. I’m guessing Codeberg doesn’t want to end up the same way.
> Codeberg made up a rule that excluded eligibility for projects they were already hosting
What does "made up" mean? It was a decision by the actual members of the platform, you know, the actual people using it! Nothing "made up" about it.
I think it's pretty clear you don't have an idea of what Codeberg is trying to be, nor do you have any interest in understanding, you just want to push this "Codefloe" platform for some reason. Codeberg make very public what the platform is for and yes, that'll change in the future too, as the world changes.
I'm sorry that phrase offends you so much that you have to resort to personal attacks. Why don't you respond to the actual substance?
The reason I'm supporting Codefloe is written in the comment you are responding to. Codeberg is not interested in hosting all FOSS, and Codefloe is. That is the reason. Its very simple.
It is pretty clear you are not making any effort at all to understand the problem people have with Codeberg's rug pull.
Not one programmer i know does this. Well no actually, one does because his boss makes him but it's so shitty he basically AI-washes his own job. How come on HN every week i come across someone who believes programming is dead and everyone has been brainwashed by Silicon Valley execs into destroying the planet with LLMs?
Honestly it is astonishing to me that there are still people who believe things like this. AI is just a tool. Software development still requires human minds.
There are people who don't understand that and crank out slop. Fuck those people. That isn't what I do.
There are people who don't understand that and won't host my FOSS. Well, I've found someone who will.
Why do you assume they will be ok with it?
They recently made some very ideological decisions…
I didn't? Maybe I didn't explain properly, what did you understood I said/wrote?
„ and if your intention is fine and good, they'll be OK with it“
That doesn’t work because „fine and good“ doesn’t mean the same thing to Codeberg voters/admins and to a large part of the hacke news population. Notably, Codeberg is morally opposed to AI.
> That doesn’t work because „fine and good“ doesn’t mean the same thing to Codeberg voters/admins and to a large part of the hacke news population.
Why on earth would Codeberg give even the slighest fucks about what the "hacker news population" finds "fine and good"? Makes absolutely zero sense.
Codeberg made those things against the Terms of Service because paying members who use the platform voted for exactly that. This is how Codeberg works, the members of the platform decides how it works.
You changed the topic. The topic is not what Codeberg should care about. The topic was trust in the humans behind Codeberg to not delete private repositories on a whim. Codeberg community is free to care about whatever it sees fit. That doesn't protect them from criticism.
Do I trust humans behind Codeberg to behave sensibly? No.
Would more precise terms of service that explain what Codeberg community thinks is ok help with such trust? Yes.
Should the humans behind Codeberg care what I think? Maybe? Presumably they do care about reaching _some_ users, otherwise why have the service public at all?
What a weird take coming from a pro-Codeberg perspective considering that many their users I are proudly #actuallyautistic people who would prefer strict rules to follow in order to feel secure.
> The rest of us, who are OK with humans making decisions rather than just going by what's written in rules [...]
Better speak for yourself and not infer from your own views to others. With bad intention this could be interpreted as if I was incapable of dealing with human decisions when all I stated is that I mistrust people who rugpull me.
> journal .. config file .. ideas or notes
So, not code for personal projects? Right? A private git repo with my own code, is not permitted.
More to the point of this thread - there is no specific affordance for a personal website.
> So, not code for personal projects? Right?
No, not right. Still wrong:
"Use it for your personal notes, your side project or any other[sic] you want to keep private".
(That's even ignoring that I was addressing the claim that you actually made, which is different from the one you're making now; you're moving the goalposts.)
That language is not in the terms of service. The word "side" does not appear on that page.
The terms of service state:
> Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
The TOS Section 1:
> Our service is open for all projects covered by a licence for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works as defined by § 2 (1) 1.
So the "FUD" I am spreading is literally the headline of the legal terms of service. There is an organization behind the spread of this information, and it is Codeberg e.V.
You have made two concrete claims about Codeberg that are verifiably untrue:
"Codeberg does not permit personal repos"
"A private git repo with my own code, is not permitted"
Codeberg's policy explicitly permits personal repos, including private code repos. Both of your claims are false. There is no getting around this, no matter how much you try to move the goalposts or the other forms of conversational misdirection you're trying to pull off here.
You have made two concrete claims about Codeberg that are verifiably untrue:
"Codeberg does not permit personal repos"
"A private git repo with my own code, is not permitted"
Codeberg's policy explicitly permits personal repos, including private code repos. Both of your claims are false. There is no getting around this, no matter how much you try to move the goalposts or the other forms of conversational misdirection you're trying to pull off here.
Haven't used Codefloe but at least they're not restricting what projects you can host with them. I don't see any preachy neo-Luddite "don't use AI" or "no private repos pls" messaging on their site.
Apparently, not wanting to spend a huge amount of resources on storing slop makes a free hosting service “neo-Luddite”.
I would be in the market for Europe-based static hosting and am glad that more European services are popping up, but this has one massive drawback: Unpredictable cost (unless you manually set a limit with support, then it presumably changes into unpredictable availability). With everyone moaning about AI crawlers I have no idea how far 10 or 500 GB bandwidth go nowadays, and I don't want to need to know.
At all-inkl.com (no affiliation except being a happy customer) I pay something like 8 EUR to get "unlimited" bandwidth (I'm sure if my site caused a problem I'd hear about it, but I can be sure that there won't be surprise bills, and I know I don't have to worry about "background noise"), static hosting, dynamic and database (which I don't use) hosting, and 5 domains included which makes the net cost of the hosting nearly free.
I don't like the "proudly made in USA" type marketing. It should not matter if the service is good.
I think local-first is a good heuristic in that it would avoid needless pushing of goods around the globe (or needless round-trips of lots of data around the globe).
Also, some people might like it if a product or service was made in US, Switzerland, Germany, Italy etc... for purely personal reasons (feelings).
It's the internet. We used to be proud that it's global. It used to be super cool to talk to people from other side of planet in real time.
In this case, it's less "proudly made in USA" and more "will likely remain available and legal to use for EU companies, even if the conflict between Trump and the rest of the world escalates"
I can kind of see it, but hetzner costs, what, 5€/m for your own server with 10TB traffic included? How is a 4€/m markup remotely justified for what amounts to setting up an apache server and pointing a domain at it? And cutting traffic to a twentieth?
Some (or maybe even most) people just want something that works, without dealing with the maintenance.
Why I currently use Netlify for my sites
1) Netlify forms. I get contact and update workflows for free
2) zero setup SSL, Webserver and CDN
3) It builds a preview link for Pull Requests.
All super useful, and worth paying for.
If I started paying lots for one of these services I would build a form handler, and manage a vps... but today it is cheaper not to
His has been my setup for many years. A simple cheap Hetzner VPS, setup to run Caddy printing a bunch of subdomains for all my side projects. If I wanted CDN, I’d look at bunnycdn. I haven’t researched a European DNS provider yet. For now it is Cloudflare.
I see the value for someone who doesn’t know or want to fuss with running their own VM in the cloud, but given the usage of LLM these days… But, one only needs a bit of education to take control into their hands.
If motor oil for your car costs 20€, what justifies spending 40€ to have a shop change the oil for you?
Bad analogy, a shop can't write software to cheaply automate oil changes
> but hetzner costs, what, 5€/m for your own server with 10TB traffic included?
Nope, they bumped the price to €7,13 several months ago. One could still find €5 managed web-hosting though.
You'd be surprised how many people pay hundreds of bucks per year for hosting wordpress sites that are completely static with 0 updates. Sites that can easily be hosted as static for free on codeberg (or github pages if you are a sociopath). The local peanut butter manufacturing facility with photos of their jars and no backend logic required type-of-sites.
I like it. But not 100% EU. Status page sends data to Google, Doubleclick, etc (1)
"In Brief: statichost.eu does not collect or share any personal information or data. " (2)
Every page contains a hidden 1px pixel img that collects 15+ parameters: https://queue.simpleanalyticscdn.com/simple.gif?version=cdn_......
I think you are picking on the product by sharing a (real) critique of the marketing website.
The product says "100% European static website hosting" it does not make any promise about the actual marketing website they have that will be privacy protected.
So yes, you are right they used in their marketing website maybe some trackers and even so based on the link you shared here they seem to use https://www.simpleanalytics.com/ which sounds okish than any other trackers and it might even be also EU hosted: "We're a three-person team based in the Netherlands, building privacy-first analytics for the web"
That's not a good excuse. If the whole selling point is that you're gluten free you can't have grain flour on your fliers.
Their _main_ selling point is that they are hosted in EU and also their analytics seems to be hosted in EU.
I did not read with very much attention their website but I think they are not saying they are gluten free and eating a whole wheat bread. But even so it is possible that a cook that produces gluten free bread to sell can eat a whole wheat bread. I see no problem with that.
I also don't think we need metaphors for this. It is clear for me that their USP is hosting in EU and the fact that on their marketing website uses https://www.simpleanalytics.com/data-collection does not contradict their product which is Hosting websites in EU.
What would contradict is hosting their marketing website on US.
Second point is: Yes, their status page should be hosted in other places and I could even understand if they want to host their status page in US or ASIA. I actually think that would be the right way to host their own status page.
That pixel seems to just gather standard data one might want to optimise the site display. I think display port size or http/s choice is hardly personal data.
Yes such info can be used to track people, but only if you have the database and means to - which a single small provider certainly doesn't. So unless you think this data is being sold for profiling I don't think that their claim is false.
Perhaps I read it wrong, but to me this means "does not collect ... data". In fact, the site uses a third-party service, which obviously sends the IP address.
Finally, the `id` and `unique` string parameters look like something specifically designed to track people.
If they use https://www.simpleanalytics.com/data-collection then that is the list they collect.
So it does not seem to collect IP. Of course it is sent to their servers but they publicly state they don't collect it.
Significantly too expensive for most users. I understand that they target agencies, but most users would prefer less and pay by site instead of paying 120 EUR / year for unlimited sited
Also the traffic cost is ridiculously high. Even AWS (which is often criticized for their high traffic cost) does not bill traffic below 10 TB (20 times higher) and then cost 0.1 EUR / 10 GB (10 times lower)
I've been looking for a new static host recently since Netlify raised prices and is terrible at preventing bot traffic. Here was my assessment of Netlify from the perspective of a small customer who just wants static hosting (and not build minutes).
Pros:
- Run by a single person, so customer service is responsive and comprehensive
- Focused mainly on static hosting without extra complexity
Cons:
- Run by a single person, so increased outage risks
- No support for MFA
- The upload process unconditionally uploads every file rather than an rsync-like sync of only the changed files, which is a pain for my large sites that only change incrementally
- Bot scraper protection is not included (they'll do it for an additional fee)
- Bundles together site builds and hosting, but I only want hosting
So, just as a curiosity, why don't you create a $5/month VPS or something even cheaper, throw nginx/apache/caddy on there, make it fetch from a git repository once a minute or whatever, then call it a day? What does the service need to provide for it to be worth paying so much more for?
This $5/month VPS can effectively handle hosting 100s of static websites for you without breaking a sweat, unless you're doing something seriously wrong.
I've seriously considered it, but then the VPS is my single point of failure. If there's a new nginx/apache/caddy/linux 0day that could compromise my server, I have to care about it and update.
My websites typically serve 500 GB to 800 TB of bandwidth per month, and I run my businesses on static sites. It's not often that I get a big burst of visitors, but it happens a few times a year, and I wouldn't want to lose out on hundreds to thousands of dollars in sales because I was trying to save $20/mo on hosting.
I’m a happy OVH user, their free static hosting (part of their paid domain service) is enough for my needs. I’ve been using that platform for more than 10 years now. At the same time I like that there are more alternatives.
My issue with OVH is the support is God awful and half French. Someone made a complaint about my server and their default stance was to nuke me from orbit and ask questions later.
Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
Much happier with Hetzner, even though it's more expensive.
I partially agree with the first part, but:
AFAIK they have a very limited number of DC built reusing shipping containers, most of them, including the ones built in the last ten years, are regular buildings built from scratch or repurposed.> Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.AFAIK there have been ONE instance of a DC taking fire, and it wasn't built from containers.
https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/incendie-sur-un-site-ovh...
1 "data center" built from a shipping container is one too many.
And, did you look at the photos you linked lol.
I did, yes.
Particularly this one: https://lafibre.info/images/ovh/202202_incendie_ovh_strasbou...
Only SBG1 was built from containers, it partially burnt due to its proximity to SBG2, but its SBG2, which was not built from containers, that burnt down.
No fire suppression and wooden ceilings?
I've had a few complaints, few auto-detections, managed to clear it all up quite easily thankfully.
However their IPv6 /128 allocation is horrendous. But I don't know anyone who does it all actually better.
They give you the full /64 even on vps or kimsufi(low end servers) it's just that the interface is configured with the ::1/128 by default in their cloud-init.
Their documentation about it is not consistent though, so the confusion is understandable.
The 9€/mo price point seems weird, considering its "just" static hosting and i can get a decently sized VPS for that money (yes, also from a EU host).
You can also get a fully-featured shared web hosting package plus email for that price. 9€/mo is wack.
You should see the pricing of Azure web apps lol
The git-repo assumption in the top comment is worth pulling on, because nearly all of these hosts share it and it quietly decides who the product is for.
I maintain an open-source React portfolio template that deploys to GitHub Pages, and git-as-the-deploy-mechanism is by far the biggest drop-off point for non-developer users. People who can happily edit a config file still abandon at "commit and push". Drag-and-drop a folder is not a worse workflow, it is a different audience, and supporting both is probably cheap here.
On the actual pitch: the thing I would want spelled out on the landing page is where the build runs, not just where the files are served from. Plenty of "European hosting" still runs CI on US infrastructure, and for anyone picking this for data-residency reasons that is the part that decides it.
> Not just servers in Europe. A European company, European infrastructure, and European values
Needs to also run on European CPUs such as SiPearl Rhea1 :)
I'm hosting my static site (https://rz01.org) there and am super happy with the free plan and the support I got from Eric. It's free, it's fast, it's in the EU.
Guys. Your top menu doesn’t even fit on mobile properly.
The spacing of every element on the site is different and inconsistent.
Everything about this site looks cheap and unconsidered.
Design is important and builds (or loses) trust.
It would take you at most an hour to make this site actually look nice.
It's the Geocities design philosophy. Worked stupendously for lingscars.
No. Inconsiderate is NOT over-the-top-loud
I just had to go check out your site with that comment. Nicely done! Was waiting for the physics simulation to either fully settle or explode, but really neither of those happened.
Yeah I wouldn’t say my own site is an example of perfect design!
Par for the course for EU businesses, I'm all too familiar with this.
Having said that, wrapping is a totally acceptable way to display menus rather than sticking everything in a burger.
Looks interesting and serves a real need. However, pricing tiers seem a bit steep, especially for folks who don't need the build step to happen on the host.
Also, at least according to the docs, ssh cert based authentication and password based authentication, but no support for public key based authentication?
> No AWS, no Cloudflare, no exceptions.
I'm so tired.
You‘re not just tired, you’re exhausted.
The difference is real. And that matters.
and i'm so tired of the majority of the world centralizing and funneling their internet through either or both of these
Especially if you know about the Cloudflare CIA tinfoil theory
It sucks that we got to "European" being used as a main selling point.
However, I am not sure why European mass surveillance and imperialism are supposed to be any better than those of any other country. Somehow that never gets answered on sites like that.
simply put, they aren’t the big bully. they don’t have the worlds strongest army and control of the most important currency to strongarm pretty much anyone who stands in the way.
i agree with your sentiment though.
None of what you say makes Europe better when it comes to the topic at hand, though?
If I have to choose US or EU to host my website, the size of their army, the strength of their currency, or their history as political bullies doesn't affect my blog or nextcloud instance.
What affects me is their privacy and data harvesting laws. EU is nominally better with the former, but the latter is eroding very fast and they're roughly the same.
> but the latter is eroding very fast and they're roughly the same.
Citation needed. Some politicians keep on pushing for data harvesting and secret backdoors and what not but most attempts have been blocked and we're still nowhere near the level like, e.g., in the US.
Because they are nowhere near the same magnitude as in the US?
should come with a pack of cigarettes and a copy of SAS volumes 1-7
Especially when it's hosted in the UK.
Wait, so Europeans dont want to use github pages? And would rather pay 9 euros/month?
Wow, yeah. I need to start offering static hosting for like $.99 (although then micropayments become an issue...) As is, I host like 100 business' sites on my VPS and only recently surpassed 1% bandwidth.
Probably better to do $10/year thsn $1/month... Maybe have a shorter first increment for people that don't want to risk $10...
Bunny.net has a similar model and it's nice (Top up the account and minimum $1 per month).
This website also has a pricing model that is a bit discouraging and quite common in my experience. Nice free tier, thanks, but the first paid tier is a bit far out of reach or not worthy. My only guess is that they are forced to do it this way to fund the free tier.
> Wait, so Europeans dont want to use github pages?
Yes
> And would rather pay 9 euros/month?
No
As a European I can only say I would rather pay 9€ monthly to European company than even receiving 5€ from USA
I self-host my application so I don't have need for such service but if I couldn't I would pay 9€
Can you pay me 900€? If not I’ll send you 500€ from the US
Can I? Yes. Will I? No
Keep your 500€, your fellow citizens in average need it more than average European
I wish you see a beautiful rainbow
I did and don't even need methamphetamine ;)
As an american, I'd rather pay than use github's free pages.
I'd go with sourcehut's pages @ €4 per month over statichost if I wanted to specifically go EU. (If not I'd go with nearlyfreespeech for $2ish per month.)
Paying to not be the product is nice. Some places make you pay and still make you the product, though, so watch out.
For less than a cup of coffee yeah.
Problem with "less than a cup of coffee" has always been that those "cups of coffee" are usually per month, and they quickly add up.
Also hardly anyone drinks $9 coffees regularly.
you have a valid point.
My cups of coffee are free (at work), so...
Out of curiosity, does a Ltd from the UK counts as EU nowadays after the brexit?
No? This company is based in Sweden, right?
That being said, the only reference to the EU is the domain itself - everything else says European, and the UK didn't move during Brexit.
The company is Swedish, but the website is hosted by datacamp in the UK. You can see it for yourself if you run whois on their domain.
No. No EU no EEA. Hard brexit. "European continent" has nothing to do with the .eu domain, which is restricted to EU citizens and businesses.
The website says European not EU. UK is without much doubt in europe.
> You can register and use a .eu domain if you are an EU or EEA citizen regardless of where you live, a resident in the European Union or European Economic Area, or a business or organization established within the EU/EEA.
UK is neither.
The company itself is located in all of those essentially (Sweden), what seems to be located in UK is the "datacamp" thing.
OT: is Cloudflare not offering Pages anymore?
I logged into CF dashboard the other day and was super confused because it appears to be replaced by Workers.
The legacy option still exists but they don’t make it obvious.
Computer > Workers & Pages > Create Application > under “Make something new” container there’s a link “Continue to Pages”
Pages is essentially discontinued and replaced by workers.
Stuff like Astro comes with Workers support.
They also have https://www.cloudflare.com/drop/
It's under Compute → Workers & Pages because Cloudflare has a confusing UI.
UniFi and Cloudflare have interesting design philosophies where every time I load them up there's an entirely new experience waiting for me.
Just yesterday I was configuring my UniFi and being confused on where I can actually find everything in the new UI. I swear the firewall/policy UX changes every version.
its like a retail store where they force you to walk through the chips and chocolates to get to the fruit and veg... just in case you didnt know how yummy chips and chocolates are...
From April 8, 2025:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/full-stack-development-on-cloudf...
The pricing is bananas. Why on earth is the bandwidth metered?
An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth.
?!
> An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth.
statichost.eu is a CDN,[0] not a single static host. Your VPS is the single point of failure, so if that one system goes down, your site is offline.
With a VPS, you'd also have to roll your own atomic updates, which is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's also not trivial.
Compare it to static hosting pricing at Netlify, Firebase Hosting, and Vercel, and it's competitive, but you should expect to pay more for a service run by a small vendor who doesn't have the economies of scale or VC money that the bigger competitors have.
[0] They're an abstraction on top of Bunny, who provides the actual CDN, statichost assumes responsibility for providing the CDN regardless of underlying infrastructure.
Can I just point out that either the vendor is small and therefor can’t actually offer the N+2 reliability you list as a weakness of self-hosting, or they are large enough for N+2 but then stop being small.
My tiny website doesn’t need a CDN and doesn’t need atomic updates.
> Can I just point out that either the vendor is small and therefor can’t actually offer the N+2 reliability you list as a weakness of self-hosting, or they are large enough for N+2 but then stop being small.
I don't understand what you mean. surge.sh and statichost.eu are both small vendors that offer redundancy. Are you saying they're not really small or not really offering N+2 reliability?
From what they list on the website, they don’t offer N+2 reliability / they are not present in sufficient geos to actually act as a CDN.
Which vendor are you talking about?
As I mentioned upthread, statichost.eu uses Bunny under the covers, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that Bunny isn't a CDN.
surge.sh has servers in 10 regions.[0]
It's not trivial to run a static host with redundancy in multiple regions, but it's also not so absurdly complex that only large vendors can achieve it.
Netlify and vercel have a generous free tier, I never paid a dime. What you might eventually pay for in those services is the exceptional DX, which this amateurish service will never get close to.
All this to say that 9€/month is way too expensive.
What's the price that you expect to pay to a service run by a single person that has to keep your website available 24/7?
I get frustrated that people seem pretty aware of the enshittification and centralization of large services, but when an indie vendor pops up that can fill a niche, people expect it to have all the bells and whistles of a billion dollar company and also give everything away for free.
If you have a just for fun website, then yeah, hop around the free tiers of whatever hosting service. If you're running any kind of online business, the difference between free and 9€/month for web hosting is a rounding error to pretty much any other business expenses you have.
Also, keep in mind that on the 9€/month plan, that's the max you pay. With Vercel, Netlify, Firebase, etc., if you get hit with a bot attack, they come after you for $100k+ and you have to beg on social media for them to call off the collectors.[0]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus...
That's a lie. 9€ is not the max you pay, it's metered and extra traffic costs extra. So what you said about others can just as well apply here.
What I see is some homemade service that costs $125/year and has little to show for it. There's nothing about what it offers on the website, the homepage has a handful of words. It claims "CDN" but doesn't say anything about what the exit points are. All I see is two "datacenters" in Northern Europe on the status page.
Heck even the CDN is in "private beta" so what are we paying for exactly? Lots of services in Europe are already available for 2-5€/month for the current level of service.
What I see is a 9€ ask for a list of promises. That's too much.
> That's a lie. 9€ is not the max you pay, it's metered and extra traffic costs extra. So what you said about others can just as well apply here.
From the pricing FAQ[0]:
> Can I set a spending limit for overages?
> Yes. Please contact support in order to set up your spending limit.
None of the others support spending limits last I checked.
> Please contact support in order to
Yikes
I checked yesterday because they were about to close my account and found Scaleway is a bit expensive.
Just checked again and found a DEV configuration for ~€6.55 and STARDUST for ~€0.43 which is interesting.
Where? At scalaway?
Yessir
But it’s in the EU! Which is obviously extremely important for static hosting.
It depends what that static content is. If it advocates for BDS in universities, for example...
So is Scaleway…
How does it compare to neocities.org, which is sadly not EU?
It seems to be more focused on business static hosting, which Neocities definitely is not. There's at least a dozen business static web hosting solutions out there and we're happy to share space with them.
Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)
I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.
I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.
It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?
The main concern isn't much about privacy, we have our share of crazy laws as well, age id, etc. sadly, that's where the society is heading, but mostly because of the worries about depending on a service where someone could decide to pull the plug because of international politics, affecting users in the process.
The current non-US movement is more based on the emerging government type in the USA, has nothing to do with the privacy laws.
There are apps you use to scan products in the store to make sure they have nothing to do with USA.
wtf is a build minute and why is it metered
i was also extremely confused by this
I tried this few weeks ago and there was no authentication on rebuild trigger, so anyone who knows your site url can start build and deploy. I don't know if things have improved since then.
Does it automatically generate a TLS certificate? I didn't find documentation about that, just that you can setup your own domain.
Seems really cool!
Yes, it does generate the certificate
I’ve been using (and donating to) xmit.co that gives you all of this for free and has really good support.
Is it open source? I can't find any code links.
What exactly is “builds minutes”? I looked at the FAQ and Docs but couldn’t find what it means. Are there static sites where the build process consumes, in total, 5000 minutes (in the paid plans)? How often are these sites being updated?
They support any build stack you want. You basically give them a docker compose file and you do what you want.
Knowing that, it seems important to have some limits.
Congrats on the launch. I added this to: https://www.findhost.app/statichost/
The name though, took me 5 reads to finally see "static host" there
My hosting is rv2 in my meterkast from by cf which costs 0 eurohryvnias.
Are you ok? I think you might be having a stroke.
It's tough to be monolingual -- everything is so strange and scary.
Tout à fait.
Doesn’t say anything about how much of storage is offered for any plan.
If they stated the storage limits explicitly, people would just go right up to the edge. Better to leave it undefined and assess compliance afterward.
I assume no storage limits but bandwidth limits
Looked cool at first, but that FreeSewing logo scared me away.
That’s a shame, because FreeSewing is a fascinating and pretty awesome project! If you know someone in to the textile crafts, you may find this changes their world if they don’t already know of it.
hold on there, nobody is mentioning AI here? :-D
Since you asked...
I wonder if they have some form of clanker protection. I'd hate to get hit by the filthy buggers and end up with a huge bill.
Before any other consideration, I love love LOVE the record-short terms.
I'll bookmark it just for that.
Obligatory as always: https://european-alternatives.eu/categories
That website is no longer worth pointing out. The person running it cannot be contacted by others so the offerings and details are frozen in time.
is there an alternative?
Multiple; see, e.g.,
Great suggestion, there is real value in these lists. Options are always good. I like the freshness transparency and that helps impart confidence going forward as it's easy to see when it was last updated but the suggested alternatives don't seem as deeply researched and subsequently there is less categories.
Why is static hosting more expensive than a VPS?
Their certificate is issued by Let's Encrypt ...
Why is that worth mentioning?
Because it looks like they are trying to appeal to people interested in European digital autonomy, but ISRG, the organization behind Let's Encrypt, is based in the US and has to comply with US sanctions.
Certificate is not european.
This looks like a Bunny CDN host?
> Not just servers in Europe. A European company
Come on, even the claim is sloppified! It's not this, it's that!
As an european I approve of the claim being "Its not this, its that", because for once its an actual good use of it, as many things claim to be european when in actuality they are american companies, hosting their stuff in an aws/azure european data region, so not really european at all.
No /cgi-bin/ directory? I am disappointed. ;-) Greetz to Sweden!
I would love a static hoster with nothing but CGI and versioned snapshots
> 100 build minutes
Er, what? A static site has no build on server.
Many static sites are made using a static site generator, which turns input files into a static site in a build phase.
I believe the important part was "on the server".
My static sites are built on the server (Github pages or Cloudflare Pages). They rebuild each time there are new commit on the repo, and that way I don’t need to version built artifacts.
I built locally for many many years and I’m much happier with this model since the commit log is a much better reflection of what changed and there are no inconsistencies as whenever you’d commit source and built artifacts that don’t match.
… It demands some extra care in terms of making sure the server can pull the dependencies and run the build scripts, but that also means my colleagues (or me in the future recovering the project from the repo) would be able to build with what was commited and nothing more… which is a requirement in my case.
A static site could be built from source on the server
"European values" We know what that means.. Slavery of one sort or another(no joke).
...European values, and requires eu tax number, eu payment card only, eu sanctions, eu censorship, eu prices(high), and residence permit of course.
Immediately blocked for half year until they think if you can have that site.
I don't trust anything governed by the EU government, they will censor/take down anything that's even mildly inconvenient for them.
Which government do you trust more then?
In our current age none of them.
OK let me reformulate then, which one or ones do you distrust the least?
Europe enters the static file hosting space.
Meanwhile, Europe's most promising aerospace company just left for USA.
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
Nope, Airbus are still safely headquartered in Netherlands.
The holding framework is in The Netherlands but HQ is still in France.
"Just" and "Published April 30, 2025" seem a bit contradictory.
Swedish company, nice.
But "European values" seems to be a non-statement.
Doesn't European also possibly mean St. Petersburg, Malta, Cyprus, Istanbul, Greenland, or Switzerland? I.e. being not the same as EU hosting?
Greenland is not part of Europe. But they are part of "Rigsfællesskabet" (The Kingdom of Denmark). So part of Denmark but with a high degree of autonomy.
Regarding "European values", I think they are just Western values but with a twist away from the US version. In my layman view, that means: Europe values citizen privacy more, US values citizen freedoms more, Europe values environment more, US values businesses more.
Until recently I would have said Europe values diplomacy more, while US values military power more. But now I dont know about that.
It’s obvious and implied that “European” here means “EU”, especially when talking about values.
Low effort comment.