back

by jeffreyrogers·1y ago·view on hn ↗
If you cache the rendered content then almost all of the advantages of a static site go away, particularly if you are a platform and can amortize the infrastructure cost over all your users.
1 comments
You say all of the advantages go away, but I read, “if you put in extra work you can achieve some of what static sites get for free”.

Which is kind of funny as the main advantage of static sites is fewer things to worry about.

The article is about how static sites are too complicated for normal people to set up, so people aren't getting those benefits for free because it's too hard for them to do.

Edit: The other thing is that non-technical users want a WYSIWYG editor. They don't want to edit markdown or html text files. So once you have all the infrastructure in place to support that it's not really any more complicated to make your customers' webpages dynamic as well.

You and I seem to have interpreted the article differently.

I read it as static sites are simpler, but paradoxically less popular because the additional parts of hosting a website are hard (getting a domain, hosting, deploying).

> So once you have all the infrastructure in place to support that it's not really any more complicated to make your customers' webpages dynamic as well.

To me, this is the exact problem the article is pointing out, lol.

99% of website could be a simple static page, but instead waste resources with complex CMS, database, caching, heavy front end layer, etc.