As far as I know there is a good amount of companies that host websites for free( github pages, cloudflare pages, other hosting companies) even intel uses github pages for hosting clear linux website.
Same reason people buy land and build a house on it: It is in their control. If I host my content on some plattform, I have to bow to their TOS/Tracking/Changes and am more like a tolerated tennant. But they are the HOA that can tell me what they want and do not want regarding content, frontend and backend. I also most possible have to allow them to use my work for their own benefit. If it is free, maybe they profit from you.
People do not get that having your own URL, your own Email and your own Websites, was the most common thing in the past. I staked my claim like the settlers going west. I own my acre of digital Land. I am free to do what ever I want on my property and nobody can take it away as long as I pay 5$ a year for the domain. That is 50$ in 10 years. That is 400$ for my whole life. For a place that I call mine. My digital Landscape. This is my space. There are many spaces out there, but this is the acre I am gonna develop.
Of course I could rent a room in the city by giving away my privacy or the control. And there are many good reasons to do this. But having your own piece of the internet is what makes me feeling more like a part of that net and not just be a cow in someone else shed.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Free hosting has been a thing for a long time. I remember having some free PHP4/MySQL hosting and they gave you like 50MB of storage space for your stuff 20 years ago.
GitHub pages and others all have some terms saying what you can and can’t host using their services. It makes sense for Intel as it’s an open-source project and fits GitHub’s goals. People can contribute to the website on GitHub, and when the PRs are merged it gets deployed automatically.
If you’re any sort of serious about your online presence, it makes sense to pay for hosting because that comes with more features, support, and certain guarantees about performance and uptime. If your business relies on it, even if it’s just a static site with your phone number and email on it, why not throw in that $5/mo on a VPS or a hosting company that’s contractually bound to provide the service to a certain level?
If everyone used free hosting whenever they can, it would become too expensive to run and provide for free. Most hosting providers that provide a free tier use it as a lure for you to grow into their paid offerings. Like, basic Cloudflare is free but downloads and video streaming through their free tier is technically against ToS. You need a paid plan to do that, and get more caching capacity, more uptime guarantees (CF basically rolls things to free tier first as if it breaks, it doesn’t affect paid customers so you’re doing free testing for them).
Free tier makes sense for individuals to learn and stuff, and I greatly appreciate having had access to free hosting for a solid 10 years. But I’ve moved on, I can afford my own servers, and there’s nobody to go under and shut down the service or tell me I have too much traffic and kick me out. You get what you pay for, after all.
basic Cloudflare is free but downloads and video streaming through their free tier is technically against ToS.
Are you sure that’s still the case?
There doesn’t seem to be anything like that here anymore: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/But in the past there was clause 2.8:
2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content
The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.
It might not, I don’t use CF for my personal stuff, and at work we have a top tier enterprise plan serving PBs of data every month. That’s what I had heard in the self hosting communities as a recommendation to not put Plex behind CF for that clause. If it’s gone, great!
But I think the point still holds: they do this to lock you into their ecosystem, and when you outgrow the free tier you’re far more likely to just upgrade to a paid plan than shop around and decide to use another CDN and migrate all your stuff and settings over. Individuals are unlikely to run into any limits, but most companies starting on the free tier will end up on a paid tier at some point unless the startup goes bankrupt. That’s why those companies sees their free tier as free marketing (people recommend them all over the Internet) and as an investment (it costs a couple dollars to host those customers but they likely will give you more dollars later on and offset the cost of providing the free tier).
Same applies to even private GitHub orgs: they’re free and good up to certain limits, and then they just hope paying the $5/mo when your company grows is far easier and more desirable than packing your repos and moving elsewhere, and have to port over all your repos, wikis, issues, PRs, org structure, pipelines and everything. At that point it costs less to just upgrade to the paid tier than spend hours of your developer’s time just to cheap out on git hosting.
Because lots of people are stuck with CMSs like Wordpress and need to have nginx/PHP/MySQL running somewhere.
In order to use something like GitHub Pages, you need a proper deployment pipeline, which a regular person won’t be able to set up.
You’re basically paying for a storage locker to keep the website files in whenever nobody’s looking at them, and also the delivery service that will show the website files to a user when they are looking at it, you can get around it by self hosting but if you’re looking at paid hosting it’s probably because you looked up how to self host and had a panic attack
Also, self hosting isn’t actually free. I mean, it’s “free” in that the people who do it generally have stuff laying around anyway and the skill to set things up, but for most people, that’s thousands of bucks in time, as the very least.
You can rent a LOT of hosting for that.
I was talking more about how the costs for self hosting are more to do with set-up and regular maintenance than with rental payments
Also sanity, self hosting imposes a steep sanity cost if you’re not well versed in OS setup and CLI navigation.
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Control
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ip number reputation
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Marketing and analytics.
Every website you visit is doing so much tracking and analytics like where your screen is focused, where your mouse is, what link is clicked. Git and CF pages are generally flat markup pages that don’t provide that kind of information.
plus if I host the page myself, I know what the stack is doing and can control the changes. While Github and CF pages are up to the whim of providers for features.
