discussion: hosting and DNS

[stefee]

There was some talk in the discord about our preferences on hosting and the domain.

There are some open questions with regards to hosting and DNS:

• How is the site going to be hosted? We are assuming this will be a free static hosting service. Maybe we could just use GitHub Pages.
• How do we approach DNS, and ownership of the domain?

Some background on the domain: The RFC establishing the website team said that the team is granted ownership of the ayojs.tech domain. The domain is currently owned by @varjmes who is a website team member. The domain is already paid-for for the next ten years.

Note that some of these decisions might rely on higher-level decisions that are still being discussed in #3.

[stefee]

My thoughts on managing the domain are:

• There's no obvious way of sharing ownership of the domain that I'm aware of.
• It doesn't require any attention for a very long time.
• It's probably easiest to just point the domain to a domain server managed by NS1 or similar, and give any website team members user access to the domain records as/when required.

My preference wrt hosting is Netlify. The free package includes support for SSL/HTTPS with a custom domain, continuous deployment (automatic build and deploy from GitHub), branch previewing, optional asset optimisation, pretty URLs (without the .html), pre-rendering for search engines and more. It's also really really easy to set up. It does most of the work automagically, because after all it's still just basic static hosting.

Note that if we want to use SSL/HTTPS with our domain and not have the www, it is important that we use a domain service that supports ALIAS records (such as NS1). There is more info on this in the Netlify blog here.

[TimothyGu]

Stating another (obvious) solution: GitHub Pages+Cloudflare

[z0al]

Totally agree with @srilq