I'm using this for my mother's website (https://www.touchofglass.eu/), and my only complaint is that it assumes you version a website in a Git repository. You can work around it by uploading a tarball or something like that, but it is far less convenient than using sftp/rsync. But considering that we are far into the free 10GB a month and I only have to update it very infrequently, it seemed like the best solution.
"Research has shown that being creative through art projects can help promote stress relief, increase self-esteem, help connect with others, and boost intrinsic motivation. So, participating in mindful art projects can open one's mind to more positive thoughts and offer alternative solutions to life problems."
And wise. Well done publishing the Web site which works without fuss in a calm way.
Why should it be? In my experience it depends on the case, and in my case it seems like an absolute technological overkill to version the site and have statichost regularly pull from some repository, as I update it perhaps once a year.
I mean, versioning is basically free from a technical / storage / time spent standpoint, and my experience says that if you don’t do it you likely will lose your code at some point
Not really, I just use Emacs' versioned backup files that are automatically generated. As I said, I don't have to update the site that often, so it is entirely sufficient. An advantage for me, besides not having to write Git commit messages, is that I also don't have to version images in Git, which I don't like doing.
Why would i use codefloe and not a more reputable non-profit provider like codeberg/disroot/framagit?
It says it's community owned, but i only see one codefloe team member on the forums and a few people (like you). I didn't find any good community rules or pricing, any political statement about the mission, etc. The only thing i found deep in the comments is that it seems to be for people who don't want FLOSS? Also the pricing mentions mixing a non-profit and a for-profit for the best of both worlds, which as Mozilla has shown is a potentially tragic strategy.
To be clear, i'm in favor of more non-profit hosts. But from reading the site i'm not convinced this one is actually for-profit, what the community stands for, and whether i'm the target audience.
Haven't used Codefloe but at least they're not restricting what projects you can host with them. I don't see any preachy neo-Luddite "don't use AI" or "no private repos pls" messaging on their site.
> You can register and use a .eu domain if you are an EU or EEA citizen regardless of where you live, a resident in the European Union or European Economic Area, or a business or organization established within the EU/EEA.
I've been looking for a new static host recently since Netlify raised prices and is terrible at preventing bot traffic. Here was my assessment of Netlify from the perspective of a small customer who just wants static hosting (and not build minutes).
Pros:
- Run by a single person, so customer service is responsive and comprehensive
- Focused mainly on static hosting without extra complexity
Cons:
- Run by a single person, so increased outage risks
- No support for MFA
- The upload process unconditionally uploads every file rather than an rsync-like sync of only the changed files, which is a pain for my large sites that only change incrementally
- Bot scraper protection is not included (they'll do it for an additional fee)
- Bundles together site builds and hosting, but I only want hosting
Significantly too expensive for most users. I understand that they target agencies, but most users would prefer less and pay by site instead of paying 120 EUR / year for unlimited sited
Also the traffic cost is ridiculously high. Even AWS (which is often criticized for their high traffic cost) does not bill traffic below 10 TB (20 times higher) and then cost 0.1 EUR / 10 GB (10 times lower)
That pixel seems to just gather standard data one might want to optimise the site display. I think display port size or http/s choice is hardly personal data.
Yes such info can be used to track people, but only if you have the database and means to - which a single small provider certainly doesn't. So unless you think this data is being sold for profiling I don't think that their claim is false.
Perhaps I read it wrong, but to me this means "does not collect ... data". In fact, the site uses a third-party service, which obviously sends the IP address.
Finally, the `id` and `unique` string parameters look like something specifically designed to track people.
I think you are picking on the product by sharing a (real) critique of the marketing website.
The product says "100% European static website hosting" it does not make any promise about the actual marketing website they have that will be privacy protected.
So yes, you are right they used in their marketing website maybe some trackers and even so based on the link you shared here they seem to use https://www.simpleanalytics.com/ which sounds okish than any other trackers and it might even be also EU hosted:
"We're a three-person team based in the Netherlands, building privacy-first analytics for the web"
I’m a happy OVH user, their free static hosting (part of their paid domain service) is enough for my needs. I’ve been using that platform for more than 10 years now. At the same time I like that there are more alternatives.
My issue with OVH is the support is God awful and half French. Someone made a complaint about my server and their default stance was to nuke me from orbit and ask questions later.
Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
Much happier with Hetzner, even though it's more expensive.
> Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
AFAIK they have a very limited number of DC built reusing shipping containers, most of them, including the ones built in the last ten years, are regular buildings built from scratch or repurposed.
AFAIK there have been ONE instance of a DC taking fire, and it wasn't built from containers.
Looks interesting and serves a real need. However, pricing tiers seem a bit steep, especially for folks who don't need the build step to happen on the host.
Also, at least according to the docs, ssh cert based authentication and password based authentication, but no support for public key based authentication?
Wow, yeah. I need to start offering static hosting for like $.99 (although then micropayments become an issue...) As is, I host like 100 business' sites on my VPS and only recently surpassed 1% bandwidth.
Bunny.net has a similar model and it's nice (Top up the account and minimum $1 per month).
This website also has a pricing model that is a bit discouraging and quite common in my experience. Nice free tier, thanks, but the first paid tier is a bit far out of reach or not worthy. My only guess is that they are forced to do it this way to fund the free tier.
I'm hosting my static site (https://rz01.org) there and am super happy with the free plan and the support I got from Eric. It's free, it's fast, it's in the EU.
It seems to be more focused on business static hosting, which Neocities definitely is not. There's at least a dozen business static web hosting solutions out there and we're happy to share space with them.
Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)
I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.
I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.
It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?
However, I am not sure why European mass surveillance and imperialism are supposed to be any better than those of any other country. Somehow that never gets answered on sites like that.
> An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth.
statichost.eu is a CDN,[0] not a single static host. Your VPS is the single point of failure, so if that one system goes down, your site is offline.
With a VPS, you'd also have to roll your own atomic updates, which is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's also not trivial.
Compare it to static hosting pricing at Netlify, Firebase Hosting, and Vercel, and it's competitive, but you should expect to pay more for a service run by a small vendor who doesn't have the economies of scale or VC money that the bigger competitors have.
[0] They're an abstraction on top of Bunny, who provides the actual CDN, statichost assumes responsibility for providing the CDN regardless of underlying infrastructure.
Netlify and vercel have a generous free tier, I never paid a dime. What you might eventually pay for in those services is the exceptional DX, which this amateurish service will never get close to.
All this to say that 9€/month is way too expensive.
its like a retail store where they force you to walk through the chips and chocolates to get to the fruit and veg... just in case you didnt know how yummy chips and chocolates are...
Just yesterday I was configuring my UniFi and being confused on where I can actually find everything in the new UI. I swear the firewall/policy UX changes every version.
That’s a shame, because FreeSewing is a fascinating and pretty awesome project! If you know someone in to the textile crafts, you may find this changes their world if they don’t already know of it.
Greenland is not part of Europe. But they are part of "Rigsfællesskabet" (The Kingdom of Denmark). So part of Denmark but with a high degree of autonomy.
Regarding "European values", I think they are just Western values but with a twist away from the US version. In my layman view, that means: Europe values citizen privacy more, US values citizen freedoms more, Europe values environment more, US values businesses more.
Until recently I would have said Europe values diplomacy more, while US values military power more. But now I dont know about that.
I'm using this for my mother's website (https://www.touchofglass.eu/), and my only complaint is that it assumes you version a website in a Git repository. You can work around it by uploading a tarball or something like that, but it is far less convenient than using sftp/rsync. But considering that we are far into the free 10GB a month and I only have to update it very infrequently, it seemed like the best solution.
Seriously, no WebDAV?
According to the docs no, but I did find out that they now provide a script that automates the process https://www.statichost.eu/docs/direct-upload/.
WebDAV used to be a tire fire, is it not anymore? I'd probably prefer SFTP, it just works
I like sftpgo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215419
doesn't seem like a good idea
Wow, your mom is so cool!
I thought the same! :)
Btw highly recommend glass workshop like this. I did one and was surprised how easy it was to make a good looking coaster with no artistic talent.
"Research has shown that being creative through art projects can help promote stress relief, increase self-esteem, help connect with others, and boost intrinsic motivation. So, participating in mindful art projects can open one's mind to more positive thoughts and offer alternative solutions to life problems."
And wise. Well done publishing the Web site which works without fuss in a calm way.
She is flattered :) Your comment and those of others here have "made her day", so thanks!
Love your mom’s work. Wow.
Do you mind sharing what (if anything) you're using to version that website? I'm wondering what folks use instead of git nowadays.
Back in the day people used to build a website without any versioning. Just make it and upload it. Make a change, upload it again.
Then people realized why that's such a bad idea
Why should it be? In my experience it depends on the case, and in my case it seems like an absolute technological overkill to version the site and have statichost regularly pull from some repository, as I update it perhaps once a year.
I mean, versioning is basically free from a technical / storage / time spent standpoint, and my experience says that if you don’t do it you likely will lose your code at some point
Not really, I just use Emacs' versioned backup files that are automatically generated. As I said, I don't have to update the site that often, so it is entirely sufficient. An advantage for me, besides not having to write Git commit messages, is that I also don't have to version images in Git, which I don't like doing.
If you'd like an EU hosted Git Forge to back it, Codefloe offers a free built-in integration with no restriction on personal or private repositories.
https://docs.codefloe.com/pages/
Why would i use codefloe and not a more reputable non-profit provider like codeberg/disroot/framagit?
It says it's community owned, but i only see one codefloe team member on the forums and a few people (like you). I didn't find any good community rules or pricing, any political statement about the mission, etc. The only thing i found deep in the comments is that it seems to be for people who don't want FLOSS? Also the pricing mentions mixing a non-profit and a for-profit for the best of both worlds, which as Mozilla has shown is a potentially tragic strategy.
To be clear, i'm in favor of more non-profit hosts. But from reading the site i'm not convinced this one is actually for-profit, what the community stands for, and whether i'm the target audience.
Haven't used Codefloe but at least they're not restricting what projects you can host with them. I don't see any preachy neo-Luddite "don't use AI" or "no private repos pls" messaging on their site.
Out of curiosity, does a Ltd from the UK counts as EU nowadays after the brexit?
The website says European not EU. UK is without much doubt in europe.
> You can register and use a .eu domain if you are an EU or EEA citizen regardless of where you live, a resident in the European Union or European Economic Area, or a business or organization established within the EU/EEA.
UK is neither.
No? This company is based in Sweden, right?
That being said, the only reference to the EU is the domain itself - everything else says European, and the UK didn't move during Brexit.
No. No EU no EEA. Hard brexit. "European continent" has nothing to do with the .eu domain, which is restricted to EU citizens and businesses.
I've been looking for a new static host recently since Netlify raised prices and is terrible at preventing bot traffic. Here was my assessment of Netlify from the perspective of a small customer who just wants static hosting (and not build minutes).
Pros:
- Run by a single person, so customer service is responsive and comprehensive
- Focused mainly on static hosting without extra complexity
Cons:
- Run by a single person, so increased outage risks
- No support for MFA
- The upload process unconditionally uploads every file rather than an rsync-like sync of only the changed files, which is a pain for my large sites that only change incrementally
- Bot scraper protection is not included (they'll do it for an additional fee)
- Bundles together site builds and hosting, but I only want hosting
> No AWS, no Cloudflare, no exceptions.
I'm so tired.
and i'm so tired of the majority of the world centralizing and funneling their internet through either or both of these
Significantly too expensive for most users. I understand that they target agencies, but most users would prefer less and pay by site instead of paying 120 EUR / year for unlimited sited
Also the traffic cost is ridiculously high. Even AWS (which is often criticized for their high traffic cost) does not bill traffic below 10 TB (20 times higher) and then cost 0.1 EUR / 10 GB (10 times lower)
Guys. Your top menu doesn’t even fit on mobile properly.
The spacing of every element on the site is different and inconsistent.
Everything about this site looks cheap and unconsidered.
Design is important and builds (or loses) trust.
It would take you at most an hour to make this site actually look nice.
It's the Geocities design philosophy. Worked stupendously for lingscars.
Par for the course for EU businesses, I'm all too familiar with this.
Having said that, wrapping is a totally acceptable way to display menus rather than sticking everything in a burger.
EU is joke and US is the only hope.
I like it. But not 100% EU. Status page sends data to Google, Doubleclick, etc (1)
"In Brief: statichost.eu does not collect or share any personal information or data. " (2)
Every page contains a hidden 1px pixel img that collects 15+ parameters: https://queue.simpleanalyticscdn.com/simple.gif?version=cdn_......
1. https://status.statichost.eu
2. https://www.statichost.eu/privacy/
That pixel seems to just gather standard data one might want to optimise the site display. I think display port size or http/s choice is hardly personal data.
Yes such info can be used to track people, but only if you have the database and means to - which a single small provider certainly doesn't. So unless you think this data is being sold for profiling I don't think that their claim is false.
Perhaps I read it wrong, but to me this means "does not collect ... data". In fact, the site uses a third-party service, which obviously sends the IP address.
Finally, the `id` and `unique` string parameters look like something specifically designed to track people.
I think you are picking on the product by sharing a (real) critique of the marketing website.
The product says "100% European static website hosting" it does not make any promise about the actual marketing website they have that will be privacy protected.
So yes, you are right they used in their marketing website maybe some trackers and even so based on the link you shared here they seem to use https://www.simpleanalytics.com/ which sounds okish than any other trackers and it might even be also EU hosted: "We're a three-person team based in the Netherlands, building privacy-first analytics for the web"
That's not a good excuse. If the whole selling point is that you're gluten free you can't have grain flour on your fliers.
I’m a happy OVH user, their free static hosting (part of their paid domain service) is enough for my needs. I’ve been using that platform for more than 10 years now. At the same time I like that there are more alternatives.
My issue with OVH is the support is God awful and half French. Someone made a complaint about my server and their default stance was to nuke me from orbit and ask questions later.
Oh and their "data centers" are just shipping containers that are prone to the occasional fire.
Much happier with Hetzner, even though it's more expensive.
I've had a few complaints, few auto-detections, managed to clear it all up quite easily thankfully.
However their IPv6 /128 allocation is horrendous. But I don't know anyone who does it all actually better.
I partially agree with the first part, but:
AFAIK they have a very limited number of DC built reusing shipping containers, most of them, including the ones built in the last ten years, are regular buildings built from scratch or repurposed.
AFAIK there have been ONE instance of a DC taking fire, and it wasn't built from containers.
https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/incendie-sur-un-site-ovh...
1 "data center" built from a shipping container is one too many.
And, did you look at the photos you linked lol.
Looks interesting and serves a real need. However, pricing tiers seem a bit steep, especially for folks who don't need the build step to happen on the host.
Also, at least according to the docs, ssh cert based authentication and password based authentication, but no support for public key based authentication?
Wait, so Europeans dont want to use github pages? And would rather pay 9 euros/month?
Wow, yeah. I need to start offering static hosting for like $.99 (although then micropayments become an issue...) As is, I host like 100 business' sites on my VPS and only recently surpassed 1% bandwidth.
Probably better to do $10/year thsn $1/month... Maybe have a shorter first increment for people that don't want to risk $10...
Bunny.net has a similar model and it's nice (Top up the account and minimum $1 per month).
This website also has a pricing model that is a bit discouraging and quite common in my experience. Nice free tier, thanks, but the first paid tier is a bit far out of reach or not worthy. My only guess is that they are forced to do it this way to fund the free tier.
For less than a cup of coffee yeah.
Problem with "less than a cup of coffee" has always been that those "cups of coffee" are usually per month, and they quickly add up.
Also hardly anyone drinks $9 coffees regularly.
you have a valid point.
> Wait, so Europeans dont want to use github pages?
Yes
> And would rather pay 9 euros/month?
No
I'm hosting my static site (https://rz01.org) there and am super happy with the free plan and the support I got from Eric. It's free, it's fast, it's in the EU.
congratz, if we are going to back protectionism, why you guys posting on HN ? I think next step should be hacker news but in EU then.
> we are going to back protectionism
Who started this, GeNuInElY cUrIoUs
How does it compare to neocities.org, which is sadly not EU?
It seems to be more focused on business static hosting, which Neocities definitely is not. There's at least a dozen business static web hosting solutions out there and we're happy to share space with them.
Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)
I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.
I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.
It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?
The current non-US movement is more based on the emerging government type in the USA, has nothing to do with the privacy laws.
There are apps you use to scan products in the store to make sure they have nothing to do with USA.
It sucks that we got to "European" being used as a main selling point.
should come with a pack of cigarettes and a copy of SAS volumes 1-7
However, I am not sure why European mass surveillance and imperialism are supposed to be any better than those of any other country. Somehow that never gets answered on sites like that.
The pricing is bananas. Why on earth is the bandwidth metered?
An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth.
?!
But it’s in the EU! Which is obviously extremely important for static hosting.
It depends what that static content is. If it advocates for BDS in universities, for example...
> An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth.
statichost.eu is a CDN,[0] not a single static host. Your VPS is the single point of failure, so if that one system goes down, your site is offline.
With a VPS, you'd also have to roll your own atomic updates, which is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's also not trivial.
Compare it to static hosting pricing at Netlify, Firebase Hosting, and Vercel, and it's competitive, but you should expect to pay more for a service run by a small vendor who doesn't have the economies of scale or VC money that the bigger competitors have.
[0] They're an abstraction on top of Bunny, who provides the actual CDN, statichost assumes responsibility for providing the CDN regardless of underlying infrastructure.
Netlify and vercel have a generous free tier, I never paid a dime. What you might eventually pay for in those services is the exceptional DX, which this amateurish service will never get close to.
All this to say that 9€/month is way too expensive.
I checked yesterday because they were about to close my account and found Scaleway is a bit expensive.
Just checked again and found a DEV configuration for ~€6.55 and STARDUST for ~€0.43 which is interesting.
Where? At scalaway?
> Not just servers in Europe. A European company, European infrastructure, and European values
Needs to also run on European CPUs such as SiPearl Rhea1 :)
wtf is a build minute and why is it metered
Does it automatically generate a TLS certificate? I didn't find documentation about that, just that you can setup your own domain.
Seems really cool!
Yes, it does generate the certificate
OT: is Cloudflare not offering Pages anymore?
I logged into CF dashboard the other day and was super confused because it appears to be replaced by Workers.
It's under Compute → Workers & Pages because Cloudflare has a confusing UI.
its like a retail store where they force you to walk through the chips and chocolates to get to the fruit and veg... just in case you didnt know how yummy chips and chocolates are...
UniFi and Cloudflare have interesting design philosophies where every time I load them up there's an entirely new experience waiting for me.
Just yesterday I was configuring my UniFi and being confused on where I can actually find everything in the new UI. I swear the firewall/policy UX changes every version.
From April 8, 2025:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/full-stack-development-on-cloudf...
The legacy option still exists but they don’t make it obvious.
Computer > Workers & Pages > Create Application > under “Make something new” container there’s a link “Continue to Pages”
Pages is essentially discontinued and replaced by workers.
Stuff like Astro comes with Workers support.
They also have https://www.cloudflare.com/drop/
The 9€/mo price point seems weird, considering its "just" static hosting and i can get a decently sized VPS for that money (yes, also from a EU host).
You can also get a fully-featured shared web hosting package plus email for that price. 9€/mo is wack.
You should see the pricing of Azure web apps lol
My hosting is rv2 in my meterkast from by cf which costs 0 eurohryvnias.
Are you ok? I think you might be having a stroke.
Looked cool at first, but that FreeSewing logo scared me away.
That’s a shame, because FreeSewing is a fascinating and pretty awesome project! If you know someone in to the textile crafts, you may find this changes their world if they don’t already know of it.
hold on there, nobody is mentioning AI here? :-D
Since you asked...
I wonder if they have some form of clanker protection. I'd hate to get hit by the filthy buggers and end up with a huge bill.
Their certificate is issued by Let's Encrypt ...
Why is that worth mentioning?
Certificate is not european.
Doesn’t say anything about how much of storage is offered for any plan.
If they stated the storage limits explicitly, people would just go right up to the edge. Better to leave it undefined and assess compliance afterward.
I assume no storage limits but bandwidth limits
Obligatory as always: https://european-alternatives.eu/categories
That website is no longer worth pointing out. The person running it cannot be contacted by others so the offerings and details are frozen in time.
Before any other consideration, I love love LOVE the record-short terms.
I'll bookmark it just for that.
No /cgi-bin/ directory? I am disappointed. ;-) Greetz to Sweden!
I would love a static hoster with nothing but CGI and versioned snapshots
...European values, and requires eu tax number, eu payment card only, eu sanctions, eu censorship, eu prices(high), and residence permit of course.
Immediately blocked for half year until they think if you can have that site.
> 100 build minutes
Er, what? A static site has no build on server.
A static site could be built from source on the server
Many static sites are made using a static site generator, which turns input files into a static site in a build phase.
I believe the important part was "on the server".
Swedish company, nice.
But "European values" seems to be a non-statement.
Doesn't European also possibly mean St. Petersburg, Malta, Cyprus, Istanbul, Greenland, or Switzerland? I.e. being not the same as EU hosting?
It’s obvious and implied that “European” here means “EU”, especially when talking about values.
Low effort comment.
According to von der Liar, European values are the values of the Talmud. Make of that what you will.
Greenland is not part of Europe. But they are part of "Rigsfællesskabet" (The Kingdom of Denmark). So part of Denmark but with a high degree of autonomy.
Regarding "European values", I think they are just Western values but with a twist away from the US version. In my layman view, that means: Europe values citizen privacy more, US values citizen freedoms more, Europe values environment more, US values businesses more.
Until recently I would have said Europe values diplomacy more, while US values military power more. But now I dont know about that.
Europe enters the static file hosting space.
Meanwhile, Europe's most promising aerospace company just left for USA.
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
Nope, Airbus are still safely headquartered in Netherlands.
The holding framework is in The Netherlands but HQ is still in France.
"Just" and "Published April 30, 2025" seem a bit contradictory.