Free static web site hosting
Sometimes you need a microsite with no server-side code. All you need is to display a pretty-looking entry page. In such scenarios you don’t need to use your own servers and use your precious resources on such trivial sites. The 2 ways to achieve this (that I know about) are:
- Using Amazon Web Services S3
- Using GitHub Pages
Both methods are very well documented. You can find the links to the official tutorials.
AWS S3
First, my favourite IT company: Amazon! S3 method requires to create a bucket with the name of your domain or subdomain. In the properties enable Static Website Hosting and point to your index document. In order for this to work, you have to use AWS Route 53 as your DNS provider. In Route 53, all you have to do is define an A record as an alias and select the S3 bucket that contains your site. If you have multiple accounts make sure that Route 53 DNS records and S3 bucket are under the same account. Otherwise you cannot point to the bucket as en endpoint.
GitHub Pages
GitHub method is also quite easy. All it takes is create a public repository, create a branch called “gh-pages” and check in your source code. To let GitHub know that you want to host a site there, you have to create a file called CNAME which includes the domain name. And in your DNS settings you have to point your site to GitHub’s IP address. The downside of this method is, obviously, your site will stop working if GitHub decides to change their IP address.