What are my best options for hosting a static site on Australian servers?
Previously I was using a normal web hosting service but they don’t work very well with static site generators and are usually overpriced for what I want.
Ideally I’d like a service like Cloudflare pages or GitHub pages, etc., i.e. there is good integration with git as my site is generated using Hugo.
Do you need SSH access to generate the site files on the server? Or just a method of uploading your site files after generating them locally?
Cheap shared hosts are a pain with SSH access, most will do it with a support ticket but often time limited or through an IP whitelist. A cheap VPS is really the only reliable option here.
I used to generate locally and then delete everything and then upload on the old host, which took way too long with my shitty internet connection so I moved to CloudFlare pages but would rather host in Australia - I guess if I want to automate things I could go with a VPS
Cheapest VPS I’m using in Aus so far is BinaryLane. $4.13/mon ($50/year). Seems OK, has dedicated IPV4 (yes you can get VPS behind CGnat4 + IPV6), IPV6 works after a bit of finangling. No backups. I only put it under low stress though.
Robtec does OK shared hosting (notably they offer an alternative to Cpanel) and was happy to permanently whitelist my home IP for SSH access. Quantumcore used to do this on request too but now it’s only temporary, I have to keep contacting them every 6 months or so.
It’s really annoying that good file transfer protocols (like rsync) also tend to require ssh access :| I wish shared hosts were a little less garbage sometimes, but I guess they have to deal with too many abusive customers for that to be cheap.
Neocities isn’t Australian but looks kind of cool. Apparently a “neocities supporter” can use rsync, here is a person doing it specifically with Hugo.
Oh hey, i use BinaryLane for a small discord bot I run. They do actually offer backups. Reasonable prices too, imo. If you want either a daily, weekly, or monthly backup only stored for the same period of time (daily backup stored for 1 day, weekly backup stored for 1 week, or monthly backup stored for 1 month), it’s $1 extra per month. Otherwise it’s an extra dollar for each extra period of time. i.e going for the monthly backup and telling them to keep a copy of it for 10 months will be 10 extra dollars per month.
You can also take a temporary snapshot for free which is stored for a week
Edit: they also offer offsite backups as well