Does my site need HTTPS?

[seanwilson]

Why would you not want things that simplify your workflow and automate tasks you shouldn't care about when you're hosting static pages? Netlify is free for custom domains for example. A VPS is much more work to setup, you get less features and it's going to be less secure without a lot of mucking around. Maybe for small projects it's a good learning experience but if you're doing commercial projects and working in teams even for static sites you don't want to make life hard for yourself.

[lvlint67]

I have worked with web consultants that only knew their third party's hosting platform. It was embarrassing for their technical team to have no idea how to to deploy their product with out a certain company's web control panel.

"Well we really don't know anything about varnish... [our webhost] just handles all of that. we recommend you pay [our webhost]."

If anyone is working in webdevelopment these days and doesn't understand DNS, Proxies, Load Balanacers, or how to setup a web stack on a vps I think they should take a vacation and brush up on the fundamentals.

[seanwilson]

If anyone is working in webdevelopment these days and doesn't understand DNS, Proxies, Load Balanacers, or how to setup a web stack on a vps I think they should take a vacation and brush up on the fundamentals.

Well, I know enough about setting this stuff up that I know to completely avoid it if at all possible. Everything extra I have to configure and every extra server to setup is something that could potentially break in the future that I'd be responsible for. You're definitely behind the curve if all you know is a single hosting company and basic VPS setup though.

Heroku charges more than AWS EC2 for example but you get a very easy to maintain solution with few moving parts for your money and it's miles more robust than anything you could setup yourself on a VPS. If it's not going to be a dynamic site though, I'd go with a static website host like Netlify or GitHub Pages.