Simple Recipe for Static Domain Hosting With Blog

Hopefully this post will help save someone time looking for similar hosting. My current hosting requirements are really simple. I need:

• static site hosting for keithsheppard.name
• blog hosting for blog.keithsheppard.name

Luckily blogger lets you use your own domain which takes care of blog.keithsheppard.name so I just need to find a static hosting service for keithsheppard.name. When I went looking for hosting though almost everything I found allows you to run at least PHP, perl scripts along with a MySQL database and costs $5/month or more. Using these hosts means that you have to pay for the extra resources, security and maintenance that goes along with allowing scripts and DB's to run. Another problem is that the cheaper services are often under-resourced which means added down time for you.

After a lot of trial and error I found hurricane electric $1/month static site hosting which has just worked with no problems worth mentioning. As a bonus you transfer your files using scp instead of the lame web-based file managers a lot of the other hosts make you use. HE also throws in a free domain name but I have my domain under dotster and I like keeping the hosting and name registration separate (that costs me an extra $15/year). So for what it's worth, this configuration has worked well for me.

UPDATE: It seems that hurricane electric is no longer advertising $1/month hosting, but no worries I found something better! You can host static content on your domain for free using github (I think something similar is possible with bitbucket). You can find instructions at http://pages.github.com/ and see my example site repo at https://github.com/keithshep/keithshep.github.com (note the CNAME file in my repo).