SSL + CNAME + static files hosting on GAE: almost free

http://blog.superfeedr.com/asset-hosting-ssl-domain/

by julien • 13 years ago

53 44 13 years ago

blog.superfeedr.com

jschlesser4• 13 years ago

Try s3 + cloudflare. You will have to pay for ssl but barring that s3 + cloudflare will let you host a naked domain for almost free. Suppose you want some cheap static publishing, set up a dev heroku instance (free) and have it publish to your s3 bucket.

julien4• 13 years ago

So, http://www.cloudflare.com/plans shows that to get your custom SSL, you need a "Business" plan at $200/month... so about 20x more expensive than GAE in this case.

taf2• 13 years ago

are you certain about needing a business plan, it looks to me that pro for $20/month also supports SSL? perhaps I'm missing an important bullet?

[update]: i am guessing from the language on the "SSL encryption type" bullet:

"CloudFlare-issued" vs "CloudFlare-issued or custom"

or custom must be what's required to host your own domain ssl cert?

robbles2• 13 years ago

You read that page wrong. It's only the Pro plan that you need for custom SSL, which is $20/month. I use it with 5 different HTTPS-enabled domains on CloudFlare.

jschlesser4• 13 years ago

$20 a month for basic ssl. I have 2 criticisims of cloudflare and im a paying customer, which arent even close to making me look for alternatives. 1. They have had a few outages (but everybody does, amazon included). 2. Ive made their page rules engine do what i need but i felt their docs were not deep / technical enough about how their engine works. I had to play a bit to get exactly what i wanted. I have largely been happy though. Im not affiliated with them in any other way.

Also, though cloudflare allows it specifically for this purpose, cnaming a naked domain isnt technically in spec for dns. Every device / browser ive tried deals with it just fine though. If you are a stickler for rules go with a www. subdomain.

dolphenstein• 13 years ago

Why bother with s3? Just setup cloudflare directly with heroku (or GAE). Then setup HTML caching with page rules. Its relatively new. Works great!

jschlesser4• 13 years ago

true

robbles2• 13 years ago

One limitation to this setup is that CloudFlare only caches CSS, JS, and images. It won't cache HTML or other dynamic content by default.

However, it IS possible to "trick" CloudFlare into caching this content, by abusing the way it looks at the file extension and headers returned from your servers. If you can find a way to serve all your markup as JSON / JSONP with a ".js" extension and proper caching headers, it will treat it the exact same as a static JavaScript file.

You can do this easily enough with a build/deploy script that sets the right headers in S3 metadata so that CloudFlare receives them with caching headers (Cache-Control, ETag, Expires, etc.)

denisu• 13 years ago

You can add a page rule for your whole domain and set custom caching to "everything".

bsimpson3• 13 years ago

StartSSL is free?! Has anyone used them before? Are their certs widely accepted/trusted?

julien4• 13 years ago

I registered many SSLs with them and never had any issue :)

pfg• 13 years ago

Yes, their domain-verified certs are free. I've been using them for a while now and haven't had any problems.

See this post for browser support: https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802

bsimpson3• 13 years ago

Very nice, thanks.

According to that page, Windows XP+, Mac OS 10.5+, iOS 2+, and Android 2.2+ are supported.

I'll have to try them.

X-Istence• 13 years ago

I've got about 5 certs with StartSSL, all free, and all work perfect in all browsers I've tried. It's good to have secure email and the like.

cdoxsey• 13 years ago

There are some restrictions. From wikipedia:

While certificates are free for certain uses, there are limitations imposed unless an upgrade is purchased: - One-year validity. - One domain name per certificate. - One certificate per domain name. - No commercial use

The last is probably a deal breaker for many sites.

salmanapk• 13 years ago

>One-year validity

Yes but you can renew for free.

dhruvbird• 13 years ago

Yes, it's free and works.

ck2• 13 years ago

If you just need a few small things hosted on SSL for page inclusion, use dropbox.

Wouldn't do it for heavy access though.

papsosouid2• 13 years ago

We have a bunch of sites that are almost entirely static, but have a php "contact us" email form. Right now they are some bloated PHP CMS thing, and I would really like to switch them over to being static. Does anyone know of a cheap service that provides a form to send email we could have our contact form POST to?

jeremyjh• 13 years ago

Uhm, do you know you can do a post to a mailto: action with your form contents? The browser will open your email client the same as a mailto link.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_for...

anglebracket• 13 years ago

How does this handle the majority of users who use webmail clients?

papsosouid2• 13 years ago

Yes, but since half the people who contact us have no smtp server, that doesn't work out too well.

eli2• 13 years ago

I'd be really curious to A/B test mailto versus contact form, but my gut is that fewer people would use a mailto.

mountaineer• 13 years ago

http://www.wufoo.com/examples/#contactform or a google docs form maybe.

xaritas• 13 years ago

I have helped a friend who does small, static marketing sites. In addition to needing a server for only thing (forwarding contact forms), I've noticed that mail from the low-end shared hosting her clients generally choose is extremely unreliable. So I've wondered if there was a need a service exactly like this. However it seemed so basic I thought... nah.

Is this a real pain point for enough people?

elyase• 13 years ago

It is for me. I do mostly static sites for small business, and use embedded forms from jotform.com but would really prefer to be able simply to post the info to an external server which handles sending the email.

weitzj• 13 years ago

You could use Google Forms. Extract the POST URL,build your own static form and put the POST URL there. Then you query your data with Google Docs

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

So, this is not a service that sends email... but I sometimes use a Google Doc survey in that circumstance. There might be a way to get google doc to email you with the response every time someone submits one?

Benferhat2• 13 years ago

> Does anyone know of a cheap service

AppEngine would do this for free.

mappu• 13 years ago

SNI is a curious choice for a 'Universal' widget, especially when GAE offers dedicated(?) IP addresses. Carriers are still selling Android 2.x phones which will give a certificate error with the widget, and IE on XP isn't exactly a small target. Although i guess it depends on your market.

EDIT: Wow, GAE charges $39/mo[1] for an IP? I know IPv4 is scarce, but i charge my customers $10/mo for SSL, and even that is a big markup on the $1/mo Linode charge me. I would honestly suggest going the VPS route to improve browser compatibility.

1. https://cloud.google.com/pricing/

lancefisher• 13 years ago

This seems too good to be true. I have a need to store dozens of GBs of photos, and I can put them on GAE for free?

According to GAE's quotas page [1], free hosting of code and static files is only for the first 1GB. After that it is $0.13 per GB per month.

[1] https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas#Code

Benferhat2• 13 years ago

You'd want to store them in the blobstore (5GB free storage) [0]. Note that you are not allowed to create multiple GAE apps to stack free quotas (n apps = n * 5GB free blobstore storage) [1].

[0] https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas#Blobstor...

[1] "4.3 Restrictions. Customer will not, and will not allow third parties under its control to: " ... "(e) create multiple Applications or Accounts to simulate or act as a single Application or Account (respectively) or otherwise access the Service in a manner intended to avoid incurring Fees;" https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms scroll down to 4.3(e)

SSL + CNAME + static files hosting on GAE: almost free

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