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I know a couple nonprofits that need a very basic website. More like a business card online.

What's the cheapest way of doing this? Ideally something that has a fairly easy interface, good for non web-developers (like Weebly or something) but cheap is more important.

  • Github Pages
  • Gitlab Pages
  • Cloudflare Pages

All of them offer free static website hosting with support for custom domains. You can use Hugo, Jekyll, Pellican, Gatsby, or whatever static site generator you prefer.

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Looks really interesting, thanks. They definitely don't appear to package "free static website hosting" as a package. I guess you have to dig around the sites, and figure out how to do it?

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Cheap. Easy. Quality.

Pick two

Cheap/easy (not quality): a Facebook page

Easy/quality (not cheap): wix, squarespace, etc.

Cheap/quality (not easy): https://pages.github.com/ or self hosting in general.

Watch this tutorial on GH pages to decide if its right for you.

You can find tons of free html templates online and make a few edits to customize the text and photos, then upload to Github.

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Vercell has a free tier if you can code

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Thanks. What level of coding are we talking about?

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Just the ability to throw together a frontend website using a framework like react or angular. Idk if you can do plain HTML pages on vercel but if you're gonna do that just use github pages

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If your project is Open source you can also have an higher limit for free.

Not only for static pages, but their serverless functions too.

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Try "Carrd" website builder.
Unlimited bandwith
Unlimited storage
Nice looking websites (clean and neat)

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Is weebly expensive?

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Weebly isn't as cheap as I had thought it would be. I spent about $150 for a year, paid in advance.

Also the CONSTANT upsell is annoying.

Wordpress or wix would be my first two guesses. Or GoDaddy?

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It's a no-API "static" website? I can recommend AWS:

  • Put the website files in an S3 bucket.
  • Set up a CloudFront distribution on front of it (cheaper and faster than to serve from S3 directly).

Easy to do, AWS has instructions in their own documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/getting-started-cloudfront-overview.html

The only real cost you incur will be CloudFront itself. You can estimate it yourself based on anticipated traffic: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

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Using Github and Netlify.

Create a free account on Github and create your website in HTML, CSS and/or JavaScript. Add those file to Github by committing those files and pushing it to Github.

Create a free Netlify account. Once those file are on Github you can connect your Github account to your Netlify account. Once it's connected it will automatically deploy it on a random url, but you can give a custom name. Your url will be: https://

<your-custom-name>

.netlify.app

Every time you make a change to the website and push it to Github, Netlify will put the changes online.

At this point you have zero costs.

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Consider only wordpress and add a domain. Best for seo and easy to use. Many free & paid plugins etc.

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Most easy way that requires no programming or IT skills I know of is https://www.blot.im

It’s $4 per month 👍

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I used Wix and liked it. Paid to not have ads though. I use google.sites for school things, assignments where I need to make a website, because it's free.

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WordPress.com

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Gcp or s3 bucket. If you name them correctly, google/amazon handle the glue.

Drag and drop html.

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I use Wix mainly for very simple sites, or for something more complex, Tilda is good once you get used to it.

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Shared web host like Bluehost

Or you can get a cheap VPS and configure it all yourself, and you’ll have to increase the size of your VPS the more you use it.

Shared hosting like Bluehost is super cheap