When comparing NearlyFreeSpeech vs GitHub Pages, the Slant community recommends GitHub Pages for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” GitHub Pages is ranked 1st while NearlyFreeSpeech is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose GitHub Pages is:
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
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Pros
Pro Very scalable
NearlyFreeSpeech charges per resources and services used, as such it is very scalable and makes static site hosting very cheap for users who decide to go with this hosting option since static sites require very little resources.
Pro Relatively easy to use
NearlyFreeSpeech provides SFTP access and a more traditional shared hosting environment compared to other services. This makes it easy for users who are not very advanced but still want to create a static site.
Pro Very privacy oriented
They will never discuss your situation with anyone to the extent that the law allows. They won't even state why a website is down. If you are not the account holder, don't expect any details from them.
Pro Very informative FAQ
The FAQ will address pretty much everything you might want to know before joining, and then some.
Pro The ability to create and edit files on the web UI gives GitHub pages the same power as a small CMS
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
Pro Supports Jekyll
A simple, blog-aware static site generator, Jekyll makes it easy to create site-wide headers and footers without having to copy them across every page. It also offers some other advanced templating features.
Pro Supports custom domains
A custom domain can be added by creating a CNAME file with the necessary domain in the root of the repository and adding/changing corresponding DNS entries.
Pro Free tier
Static websites can be hosted on GitHub Pages for free as long as the repository is public. Private repositories start at $7/mo.
Pro Allows for all the git features when building your site, too
Cons
Con Only for those who know what they are doing
They do absolutely no "hand holding" unless you purchase a support package and even then it's barebones.
Con The FAQ is so long that you can spend over an hour reading it
That's the FAQ if you are thinking about becoming a member. There's a much more detailed FAQ for members.
Con Not free
Although it can be very cheap to host a simple static site on NearlyFreeSpeech for about $3/$4 a year, it still is not free.
Con Unable to set cache expiry, must accept GitHub defaults (which are short)
Low cache expires - GitHub sets the cache-control: max-age header to 600 seconds, or ten minutes. Normally, you would set this value to a year so that it stays cached, and then use fingerprinting on your assets. Instead of serving style.css, you would serve something like style-62c887ea7cf54e743ecf3ce6c62a4ed6.css. As it stands now, assets are rarely going to be cached on repeat visits.
This will give a low score on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights with a 'should fix' recommendation around 'Leverage browser caching'.
For a high traffic site this may have implications