reccommended demo hosts

[JCPalmer]

I have a number of test page I put out on GoogleDrive.  Just got an email saying that the hosting function is going away at the end of the month.  Actually I did not like the weird generated urls anyway.

They suggested 2 alternatives, Blogger & firebase hosting.  Before I decided to move stuff, thought I would see if were was other alternatives.

[mattstyles]

Everyone has their favourites for this sort of thing.

Dropbox still serves content right? Although probably has the funky urls.

I'd suggest grabbing a machine from a cheap provider, DigitalOcean is about the cheapest (stay clear of simple static servers, they're absolute turd), setting up your own server can potentially be daunting but there is a big user base of tutorials at DigitalOcean (the tuts are applicable to any service you get from whoever) that will lead you through provisioning a server and setting up apache or nginx or varnish to serve your pages. For $5 or $10 and about an hour of your time you'll have a server much better than the cheap standalone static servers, hook up your DNS and you're good to go.

There are loads of these such services around but DO are still just about the cheapest, their boxes arent great (obviously, for $5/$10 pm you're not going to expect to serve 1000's of pages per second) but they aren't terrible either, you get what you pay for, its cheap, but reasonable.

Amazon and Google will do you better boxes, but their portfolio of products can be boggling and they're a bit more expensive even for bottom end.

[JCPalmer]

3 minutes ago, mattstyles said:

Dropbox still serves content right?

Think you need a paid account now.  Think it is grandfathered for old accounts.

I am talking about just demo / stuff for now.  For actual games, I plan on using apps store & google play for media distribution.  Will want some presents with my own domain at that time.  Probably not the cheapest, but do not want to pay for near "nothing" now, or have to move later.

[aWeirdo]

I believe http://github.io is free to use  
Otherwise you can get 30 days free microsoft azure trial, and after that you can get a 12 months promotion subscription where the first 25$ usd expenses are free each month (more than enough for a low-end server used for demos.)

[JCPalmer]

Thanks,  I saw an interesting page on github.io btw, but did not see how to do one.  You might need a paid account to do, but here I see something that might more meet my needs.  I only have cloned projects, but the combo of original repos & some static html / js file hosting seems more worth it.

[JCPalmer]

Actually, Github just let me create a repo & I never got a paid account (probably shouldn't have say that ).

Now I can just work locally & push .  I just put an index.html in the root, i think / hope.

[mattstyles]

You can use a username.github.io as a kind-of global demo site, or you can create a gh-pages branch and do it per repo (you don't strictly need to use the gh-pages branch, but it is recommended as you don't want demo stuff all smudged in with your code), and yes, its free (there are restrictions, on file size and stuff, maybe traffic too, but you should be fine for demos, there are some big busy projects using github pages for their public face).

I'd imagine bitbucket or gitlab etc offer similar services if, for some reason, you don't want github.

[Pryme8]

github, and set up your branch on the initial put as gh-pages and make sure you have a index.html and you can host what ever that is static html content.

[adam]

https://github.com/blog/2228-simpler-github-pages-publishing

[JCPalmer]

I do not have my own repositories.  I PR into Babylon/Babylon.JS, and push into Babylon/Extensions & makehumancommunity/community-plugins.  I like the separate repo I created.  I got the first demo moved over & up (4 on deck locally). 

I really like the versioning of content and publishing just by pushing without having to learn something different.  Almost all of my scenes also have a .blend file, so I can just have a blends sub-directory for those scenes which need it.  Someone can still reference it as above, and get those files if they want.

[Pryme8]

You could always uses the Cors loader method I demonstrated to load the blender files as well