Inexpensive Single Page Website for Organization

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Hey Gang,
I own a domain (through Hover) and previously created a SquareSpace website for an organization that decided to disban. Right now we have a single page website that lets people know the organization has gone away and with a contact form that will send any inquires to the former president (me) to deal with.

The SquareSpace site comes up for renewal later this summer and we really don’t want ot spen $144 for a one page site. Ideally, we’d like to keep the website up a year or two as we do get inquiries we need to respond to from time to time.

Any suggestions for an low (preferably no) maintenance place where we could re-create a simple one-page site with a contact form? We would then redirect our current domain from Hover to the new host.

Is wordpress.com an option? We would want to use our own domain name.

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Not sure what everyone in your organization’s web programming experience is like but, Netlify offers free hosting of static sites and complex forms for free for 100 submissions/month.

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If you don’t mind coding and styling yourself could use Netlify. It’s pretty simple to get a form going through it and to setup a custom domain but the downside is you have to code it yourself.

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I think netlify + hugo is incredible…but you need to know your way around git, and probably a bit of html and golang templating.

I wonder if a simpler setup is https://carrd.co/. It’s only $19 per year for the pro version, which enables you to use your domain name. It’s got a point and click site builder (not as fancy as square space)…and the person who runs it is a big contributor to the open source community through the free web templates at https://html5up.net.

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Namecheap and other hosts offer cheap hosting for a year (I think I got some hosting for $10/year), you could throw up a quick Wordpress site and be done with it - obviously Wordpress is more powerful than you need, but it’s easy to install and there are plenty of guides and free themes out there.

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Personally I would find a friendly dev with a few spair hours to throw up a sever in the google cloud, the lowest teir offers are free and it would take a few hours at most.

I would offer to do it all for you, but I would not trust strangers on the internet offering free websites…

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I’ve used TSOHost before. They’re UK based but offer managed web hosting for £14.99 per year for up to two websites. I guess that translates to around $20 for the year but then you have no management to do once it’s set up.

I found they were very good with next to no slow down despite being shared hosting.

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This is definitely an option.

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I’ve used Amazon Web Services to host some internal web tools I wrote for work that we couldn’t host on our public web site or Intranet.

On the free tier you get the first year free, and after that it worked out as cents a month for low utilisation.

You could always host the page on your own server at home (a Raspberry Pi zero on a segregated section of a home network would give you ample power and the sectioning off would give you security - you would need to check what your router supports or by say investing in an Xfiniti edge router X as recommended by Steve gibson on the TWiT Security Now podcast).

Finally, many ISPs give you a smidgen of “free” web space with your contract. Perhaps your ISP or someone else’s involved with the organisation could suffice?

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You can even use an owned domain on a documentation based (read: webpage) github repo. Have a look at github and jekyll for that. They have good documentation at https://help.github.com/articles/using-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/ .

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WordPress is definitely a great option and completely free. I did the same thing with a domain I own. I pointed the domain to the WordPress website that I created and even when the visitors are on the website, ‘wordPress.com’ is not displayed. The only thing you must remember is that WordPress may display ads to the visitors, but that may not be a problem under your circumstances.

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Hover might offer free or very inexpensive hosting as well. For a one page site, there are plenty of free resources online to help you throw something up.

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I just stopped into the thread to suggest this. GH pages is free. It’s just a little geeky to set up. Once it’s there, you don’t have to worry about it, though. You can use a custom domain for free as well.

Here’s a project I’m currently working on that’s hosted on GH Pages: https://composerdiversity.com

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Wordpress is an option, I use it, but be aware that the free tier runs ads.

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Could try blogger.com? I think they’re still free and you can port your existing domain to it. it should be more than enough for a 1 page site and its Google so you know it will work for your Google apps.

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If you have a DVD with iLife 11 somewhere, you can still install iWeb. From here you can generate the page you want and upload it with FTP.

To get iWeb only, installed from an iLife 11 DVD: (In case you didn’t know)

  1. Open the DVD from the desktop
  2. Secondary click the installer alias and show the original file
  3. Find and open the iWeb.pkg file
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+1 for GitHub pages. Or linode and a static one page website. Or Azure or AWS.

Depends what you need - can do - and how ‘cheap’ it needs to be.

Weebly/Wix/page builders would be another option. Google or Zolo pages?

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Create an Amazon s3 account… Create a bucket and set it to be a static web page. Put your index.html file in it. Point your domain to it at hover… And you are done. It works. I do exactly this. It will cost you nothing for a while and then a couple of cents per month.

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Hover doesn’t offer hosting, they just offer domain names (and email).

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I didn’t imply that they did.