How did kids deploy their websites before things like Netlify, Vercel existed? Was there some simpler way that didn't require setting up a server, buying a domain, SSL, setting up DNS records and then running nginx or apache on the server?

I used GitHub pages in my college days for static sites

000webhost and cPanel 😂

Hostinger also did php hosting. x10hosting was also a thing.

@broad-receptionist-41400 @dazzling-autumn-14365 Would you get free subdomains then or did you buy some custom domain?

@dazzling-author-99268 Never bought a domain. Didn't have a card. Got some free

.<http://co.vu|co.vu>

and

.tk

domains. Not great for SEO though.

.tk ftw

@dazzling-autumn-14365 Did you still need to update the DNS records manually or was it integrated with the hosting provider?

You had to FTP your files into the hosting with FileZilla and it'll be served

@dazzling-author-99268 I used to do Manual but don't remember if automatic was an option or not.

You had to FTP your files into the hosting with FileZilla and it'll be served

Nostalgic. 😄

Everything seemed shady on the internet to me when I was in school. I just gave up and copied my "cool" websites on CDs and shared them with my friends.

Did you use Nero burner? 😂

I think so. But if I remember just copying files directly worked too in Windows Explorer. Used Nero to burn disk images.

Domains were bought via godaddy/other registrars. TLS certs weren't a thing (simple cert would cost many $$, many processors were not capable of handling TLS offloading without a significant performance hit). Shared hosting was common, you'd get a wimpy shared host with php/MySQL database. Most of the files uploaded either via cPanel, or via FTP. cPanel came with installers for various software like WordPress, Drupal

Nice tidbits @modern-table-48211. Seems like the deployment process for simple websites has simplified so much over the course of years. Most hobbyists can just run a cli command now to deploy sites.

Yeah, netlify, vercel, GitHub pages have significantly reduced the barrier for entry to have a website. I had my websites - sathyasays.com & sathyabh.at hosted on Wordpress on x10hosting, then moved to a shared host (Expertrio /web1 based in Mumbai) from 2007 to 2012. Moved to securedragon VPS from 2012 to 2015 and then digital ocean from 2015 to 2019. I exported the whole content and migrated to Hugo, hosted on Netlify now. The first time I was blown away with ease of deploy was when I gave heroku a try. Shame after heroku’s acquisition they have remained a bit stagnant.

Check out https://railway.app/ for fullstack projects.

@dazzling-author-99268 ah nice to know. I dont use the CLI but the preview-on-PR and auto-deploy-on-merge by netlify has been fantastic.

Would also like to mention and appreciate the great free tiers by cloud providers, you can learn a ton just by running t2.micro instances on aws!

Geocities

If I want to test few saas product ideas then should I buy 2-3 domains or any other suggestions?