Static publishing and your hosting #

Static publishing splits a site in two: the Exponential installation where people edit, and a static copy that visitors get. For hosting, that changes what must be public, what must be patched quickly and what it costs.

What you'll have at the end #

A plan for where the editing installation runs, what it needs from the network, and which hosting costs disappear.

The editing installation can stay internal #

The public site is served by GitHub Pages or another static host. The Exponential installation then only needs to be reachable by editors: on an internal network, behind a VPN, or behind an IP allow list.

What it needs:

• Outbound HTTPS (or SSH) to the git host for the push, and to api.github.com for the GitHub setup.
• Its own web server reachable from itself: the build crawls the site over HTTP. Set CrawlURL to an internal address such as http://127.0.0.1/ when the public name does not resolve inside.
• Inbound only for forms if you use the form endpoint: the static site's visitors post to staticpublish/form on a public address. Without that, forms show a link instead.

Resources #

• A build renders every page once. Plan for a few minutes of CPU for hundreds of pages; partial builds of single pages run on content publish.
• Disk: the target folder holds one copy of the site plus its git history. Builds are kept below var/<site>/static-publish/.
• Builds and publishes run as console processes, never inside a web request, and only one per target at a time.

Clusters and Velocity #

Files below var/ are read through the cluster file handler, so DFS clusters work. Under Velocity the job starts as a detached console process. See the feature page.

Costs #

• The public site's hosting: free on GitHub Pages for public repositories, or the cost of a plain static web server.
• The editing installation: smaller than a public one, because it carries editors only, not visitors.
• Less on-call work: a security release of PHP or Exponential is no longer an emergency for the public site.

Limits of GitHub Pages: GitHub Pages limits and terms. Keeping private content off the copy: Keep private content private.

Make yours now #

Try it on a staging site: Make a free website in 15 minutes.