[awill]

I get that this is easy, but there are 2 main cons:

1. It is $4 a month (that's a lot for a really a simple static page)

2. Vendor lock-in. These sites come and go and might not be around in a couple of years.

This is why I recommend Hugo hosted on netlify. Sure, it has a learning curve (but plenty of open source themes make it fairly easy). Hugo spits out plain HTML so there is no lock-in, and netlify hosts for free. If Netlify goes away, I can host somewhere else.

[jgh]

I'm building an API right now that I plan on monetizing so I'm looking at different simple CMS programs. This one (LonelyPage) immediately intrigued me because I don't need a lot of features. Basically people can pick a pricing plan and pay through Stripe. No portal is needed for now really other than to see their API key.

I'm not a frontend web guy at all so I'm trying to avoid doing as much of that work as possible. Wordpress seems like it would be pretty much perfect, but for the life of me I can't get it working with docker and HTTPS. All of the solutions involve editing some php files that are easy enough to edit without docker, but I would probably have to make a custom docker image to make it work in a container. Bleh.

Ghost is OK but it has like 0 customization and the themes are all 4 years old and no longer work properly.

In any case what I'm getting at is I'd happy pay like $50 or $60 for a simple CMS thing that has some themes and whatnot, but I want to host it myself. And I don't want to pay monthly for it.

Thanks for the Hugo suggestion, I'm checking it out now. I had never heard of it before.

[artpar]

I have been working on daptin [1] with similar goals (self-hosted being the top priority). It is not just a static file host and actually exposes APIs which can be used in the static sites.

For customizations, I have built "Actions" which can basically do anything (to the extent of executing javascript or call external apis) and as for themes, you can upload any static site/design/template (be it vue or react or hugo).

[1] https://github.com/daptin/daptin

[canttestthis]

I don't think $4 a month is a lot to pay for a not-so-tech-savvy small business looking for an easy way to have an online presence, though of course there is only one way to make sure.

[pchristensen]

I’ll channel my inner patio11 and say that a business that cares about saving $9/mo vs Squarespace isn’t going to be a valuable or long-term customer. Pricing is about defining who your customer is, but also who your customer isn’t.

[Cub3]

I'm using Gatsby (ReactJS static site builder) with Netlify + Netlify CMS for my blog, going to start doing all client websites in this way as it's easy to set up and the interface is super simple for editing, best of all the whole thing is free.

Open source here: https://github.com/csi-lk/csi.lk

Blog link: https://csi.lk

[sandGorgon]

if the page builder is able to export to something like Gatsby or Hugo templates, then that eases the fear of lockin

[Kpourdeilami]

Since it is just 1 page, I think you should be able to just save the source with all the dependencies and then host it somewhere else afterwards

[ams6110]

wget will do that for you nicely, also. I've used it to make static archives of fairly complex Drupal-based sites, so a one-pager should be a breeze.

[jstanley]

Templates? If it's just one page, just download the HTML.

[sandGorgon]

it may or may not be one page - however, that is a pretty fundamental question you ask about static site generators.

Why use them, when you can use plain html ?

Well, its because they come with nice features like componentized layouts and templates, optimized build (including minification of any js, etc) and most importantly content in markdown/yaml for easy editing.

[jstanley]

For me, the reason to use templates is so that the navigation, header, footer, etc. is internally-consistent without O(n) human effort.