
Show HN: 1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database (1mb.site)
744 points by 1mbsite 6 months ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 239 comments

Things I love about this:

I would have given my left ear to have a similar service growing up. There were a billion "free hosting" sites that let you throw PHP scripts up on them, and "free mysql" hosts that let you have a couple of free tables of X rows, which give a 12yo an incredible head start when it came to web-dev. The downside is that those sites were trying to push scuzzy gambling sites or were soft targets for hackers. This feels like a clean, modern reincarnation of that!

No, this isn't posterous where your creations will live forever, this is a little playground for those who don't know how to or rather not configure a VPS for a little toy they've made.

Great job!

(EDIT: Shout-out to 2008's T35.com and CJB.net and their free php hosting and short sub-domains https://web.archive.org/web/20080617010556/http://www.t35.co... , https://web.archive.org/web/20080408210303/http://www.cjb.ne...)

Thank you for your kind words! In closing I can assure you that your creations will live forever on 1MB as long as you don’t delete your account and follow everything outlined on https://policy.1mb.site. Also pride ourselves in being more secure than your average free website host

> In closing I can assure you that your creations will live forever on 1MB

I can assure you that the opposite is true. Tumblr deleted half their content. MySpace lost all their content. GeoCities lost everything. Facebook "accidentally" lost Zuckerberg's old posts and with all the money and software "engineers" in the world can't recover them. Startups and corporations that had the kind of money and technical expertise you could only dream of can't keep data forever. Don't get carried away and make promises there is no way you can keep.

EDIT: I see you've redefined forever in the fine print:

> 1MB is not a big company. This is a project funded, developed, and maintained by an individual. By subscribing to Pro you are helping keep this project online for years to come.

> (1) Forever or for the life of the project. 1MB isn't going anywhere, but we also can't predict the future. No refunds!

While I'm not trying to invalidate your point, it seems that given the size of 1MB sites you could have a backup of a few milions of websites for under $1[0]. Also, while the maximum size is 1mb not all sites would use all available quota so the actual average size will probably be lower than 1 megabyte driving the cost down even further. This means that that even without VS's or other investors a single person would be able to cover the costs of keeping those sites. Well, assuming there is a will to do so.

[0] For example,archive storage at OVH runs at 0.0026$ per GB, so having a backup of 4 million 1mb sites would cost 1.04$/month for three copies of data.

> GeoCities lost everything.

Small nitpick, but Yahoo deleted everything. Let's not forget how poorly run Yahoo is.

Thanks for the clarification. For the purposes of my argument, the reason why the data no longer exists is irrelevant.

> software "engineers" The quotes aren't necessary. They definitely have a few good software engineers, and this issue definitely isn't a technical one.

Sorry, that's just personal pet peeve. I like to take a dig at software programmers who call themselves software engineers.

I also notice the inflation of laissez-faire self titling but it usually doesn't bother me. Just the other day I met a flying machine service worker who proudly introduced himself as a copilot. Our train handling ancestry are locomoting over in their repositories about this!

Edit: it looks like these carcas pits are all calling themselves graves now ;-)

Just make sure it shows up on web.archive.org, then it should last pretty long at least.

I ran one of the larger free hosts and managed and hosted around 100 others; security is a big issue. If you get mildly popular the number of attacks will jump up. Hope you know more than I did and that the tech evolved enough; the hosts I built and managed were 10+ years ago and I had to create my own freehost specific patches to php, apache and mysql to protect from abuse. You do not do dynamic so that makes a large difference, still they will try!

Edit; we also made custom scanners for porn and phishing; especially phishing, at that time had a simply pattern; the phishing page(s) would have keywords in them and would not be linked anywhere on the domain while not being the index.html. That allowed us to move almost all of them automatically.

Have you had a proper security review? I don't think you would have made that mistake with user-websites being able to log out the user if you had designed with security as an important objective.

Like, it's OK that you didn't, but maybe you should check that your entire public API (all microservices, UI, etc) will really be secure.

You will probably struggle to get a secure interface while user content is served from the same domain as your UI.

For reference @hopscotch appears to be referring to this post: https://forum.1mb.site/?t=1556326142930

I think the interaction in this forum thread says a lot about my focus on security. An issue was reported and I jumped on it immediately. I’m not going to sit here and claim to be perfect, but I am going to tell you that I work really hard to make sure I do stuff right and fix my mistakes ASAP. I have had white hat hackers review my API by the way and have patched reported security vulnerabilities.

Kudos for quickly adding an anti-csrf token to logout, but I agree with the grandparent that hosting arbitrary user content on the same TLD as the management interface is still problematic security-wise.

See github.com vs github.io[1], amazon.com vs. elasticbeanstalk.com, azure.com vs azurewebsites.net, etc... Every major company I know of that hosts arbitrary user content dedicates a TLD to it that's not shared by the management APIs.

[1] https://github.blog/2013-04-05-new-github-pages-domain-githu...

You likely want a separate domain indeed. See https://security.googleblog.com/2012/08/content-hosting-for-...

Sites like Tumblr do it and are fine, and they allow custom HTML and JS also. Cookies are HTTP only and inaccessible with JavaScript. And framing is blocked.


Really? In my experience not many people care about logout CSRF, it's the lowest of low risk vulns that infosec consultants write in a report when they don't have any real vulnerabilities. I'm not sure its presence really says much about the site overall.

Effort is much better spent elsewhere - strict Content-Security-Policy, for example. Or, if there are 'real' CSRF vulns that actually do damage

How are you guaranteeing that sites on 1MB will live forever?

They are redefining "forever" to mean "until the service closes".

That's...pretty much the guarantee for any product that claims "lifetime". The Tilley clothing company (best known for their hats) warrants many of their items "forever" as in (and I quote) "leave it in your will". That all goes out the window if Tilley goes out of business, however.

I don't know, that analogy doesn't quite seem right. This company is providing a service, not producing a product - it's more like if the Tilley clothing company said something like "we will continue manufacturing hats forever".

This reminds me of "lifetime" warranties on products where "lifetime" is defined as some arbitrary lifetime of the product, rather than the lifetime of the buyer.

I think neocities.org is closer to what you describe in your first paragraph (and is also ad free and clean).

Can you run e.g. PHP scripts on Neocities? I know this is why I quickly outgrew Angelfire and kin as a kid....

AFAIK it is only static content.

for now :)


To be fair though, I don't think that's a huge problem. Plenty of excellent static site generators exist (I use Jekyll) and truth be told if you want any real level of functionality this probably isn't the service for you anyway.

I suspect free-webhosts.com was a site you frequented, too?

God, I'm amazed it's still exactly how I remember it!

I wasted so much time on that gosh darn site...

I'm glad I'm not the only one that visited that website. I was there religiously. If you ever want to get all nostalgic and stuff my email is in my profile!

free.fr has been offering this, ad-free, since the 90s. It is Xavier Niel company, Free is a French ISP and he alos funded "42" : a private, nonprofit and tuition-free computer programming school IT school.

Love it, but one suggestion:

I'd change the headline to "1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database".

That database is the edge you have compared to Netlify and Github pages people are asking for :)

The authentication part is a nice touch, too. Feels more like a community thing.

Checked out the API and you even have easy to setup database permissions. I like it.


Questions: do you plan to offer paid plans for people wishing to host more than 1MB, or having paid support? Maybe paid private login workspaces and SSO could be a paid feature too.

Thank you! :) Pro members get 1GB of storage and some other features: https://pro.1mb.site (coming soon)

Nice to hear! Sounds like you have a great product AND a plan :)

Pro launched! :)

You should really consider having Pro not being a onetime fee, but rather a monthly subscription, or at the very least both options. A single one time $100 fee is unlikely to go well with most users, but many more would be ok with contributing $5 or so a month if it meant supporting a good service.

Pro is $5 a month or $100 for a lifetime plan. The monthly option isn’t available until I implement the new payment processor but please stay tuned I hear you :)

Worth telling people that a $5 a month is coming soon. Collect their email addresses.

Also the "no one can predict the future" is a bit scary so another thing is to promise you can get your data out as a static site for netlify, github etc. at any time.

Hit the subscribe to newsletter button in account settings I’m sending out an announcement when monthly pricing launches.

Thanks. But: I am suggesting you add clarity for other visitors to your site so you don't lose them because they think $100 and "it might disappear next year + tough shit no refund" is the only option.

By the way your offering fills a certain niche that I am interested in. That is the niche where a technical person like myself wants to design a site using HTML & CSS in text editor (how else would you do it!) but there is another nontechnical person who wants a nicer editor to edit the content. In addition I want a fast and cheap CDN type of offering. Netlify is what I use now, but it means I have to make the wording changes which sucks.

I imagine this is a common situation for small time website developers. For example if I make a site for the local pizza delivery, they might need to change their menu, but it is good if they can do it directly. But I like to host it as a static site so I know it is less likely to get hacked or be slow, and I can back it up more easily (looking at you Wordpress+MySQL+Bunch of PHP files called plugins).

Hey I know monthly is more popular with investors but thanks for offering a one time fee, I consider that quite innovative for the web-hosting market :)

That was soon! Nice work!

I've taken the liberty of adding that database bit to the title above. (The submitter can let us know if they don't want it there and we'll take it out if so.)

Super nice. Despite presence of weebly, gumroad, shopify, squarespace, carrd et al, there is something missing that would put the rest of world on web, I feel; much like how WhatsApp has replaced most modes of personal communication in one fell swoop over the years, and how Twitter has taken over micro-blogging (key point: Both are free).

To do that, I guess, 1mb or similar businesses could add capability to create a website, post to it, update it via something as ubiquitous as WhatsApp, kind of like a Tumblr or posterous clone; add ability to accept payments, sell things.

Curiously, among my friends, telegram is used to consume content. They subscribe to telegram-channels and simply search for content posted and browse it right from the app. Much like how YouTube has replaced games, and Instagram has replaced Facebook, telegram in a sense has replaced Google/Browser.

Perhaps, someone needs to invent a new kind of web that is in symbiosis with WhatsApp or these other very popular apps. I guess that is exactly what Meesho [0] is doing, but not quite? May be some business like 1mb will figure it all out.

[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/meesho/

WhatsApp is aggressively anti automation unless you're a big business. I'd definitely go for updates via email, though.

Whatsapp is opening it's biz API [0], hence founders are publicly speaking against it [1]. If you are big you get it first indeed.

[0]: https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...

Looks sweet. I might actually use this. A few questions:

1. Why a custom JS-based CLI tool for deployment? What does it do? Why not something like plain SSH?

2. What is the plan for this? Presumably you'll want to monetize the project? Will you ever add ads to my sites? Or will you offer premium features?

3. What's the reason for the NoSQL DB?

4. Your CLI tool only allows .png files as images. Is there a reason you don't allow any other types?

5. Is there a limit on the number of sites you can have or the storage you can use?

1. This tool allows you to deploy all files in your directory to your site. If you were using the API directly you’d need to deploy each file individually. 2. It was monetized in the past but Gumroad banned my account because they consider web hosts to be a risky business. I’m re-implementing Pro soon (more info: https://pro.1mb.site) 3. It just seemed like the most logical way to store and retrieve data with JavaScript. 4. It’s coded by a friend of mine but I’ll pass that feedback along! Thank you 5. Only 1 site per account. There is a 1 megabyte storage limit. I know it sounds crazy but most users don’t even come close. Pro users get 1 gigabyte.

Can u tell about your experience getting banned?

Were u allowed to withdraw your balance? What r u switching too?

They banned me without warning and refunded all my customers and I wasn’t impressed. After reaching out they refunded me all the money I lost though. I’m studying my choices

Sftp would be incredible

For security reasons I can’t, but I wonder if somebody could make a SFTP wrapper that uses the 1MB API.

What security reasons?

You can totally have a secure sftp endpoint on your filehost.

I can’t reliably reject uploads if they are out of storage or enforce file types. Stuff like that

You could do that with a wrapper around sftp, no?

Dude, if I just want to put a page online, the last thing I want to have to deal with is SSH...

Have browser, will content.

SSH/SFTP is a standard protocol. Their API is not. Many more devices support sftp than their API. I don’t always have a browser, but I often have ssh.

I'm more often somewhere that blocks port 22 than port 80, but I get you

but SSH/SFTP are a heavier burden for dev & ops than an HTTP API. WebDAV is a more suitable request in this case

I saw an online editor

I love this service, and I have used it from the start. Whenever I see these free services offering freedom and creativity I see easy opportunity for abuse. I hate visiting a free service to see a note left behind from the developer - "sorry, we were flooded with spam and I had to wipe the database/shutdown the service". What plans do you have in place to prevent this from happening. All I can think of when I see free web hosting is "how long will this one last". Explain to me why I should place my trust in this not shutting down in the next couple of years :)

I have automated filters coded to help with spam and other abuse. I’m also recruiting volunteer moderators as we speak. Another reason you can trust that 1MB won’t shut down anytime soon is that it’s a profitable business and I’m passionate about building it.

The service itself is really cool and lines up nicely with the likes of Netlify and Github pages. I have two concerns though:

1) This doesn't seem to be connected to any major company, so how are you going to handle abuse of the service? With 'free hosting' offerings like this often comes a wave of abuse and malicious actors, so dealing with them is going to take significant resources.

2) How are you planning to monetize the service? Even though most sites hosted wont exceed a few kb, hosting fees will quickly add up, and unless you are using a cheap bare metal server you will likely face significant monthly bills.

These concerns aside, the service looks really awesome for most personal blog use cases, so congratulations to a successful launch!

1. For the past half year I’ve been moderating the site myself and also have automated filters I’ve coded. I’m recruiting some volunteer moderators soon! 2. 1MB was monetized in the past but got banned by our payment processor because they consider web hosting to be a risky business. It’s honestly my own fault I should’ve read the terms. 1MB will be monetized again soon when I implement a new payment processor: https://pro.1mb.site

Here's a list of payment processors that was on HN earlier today:



Just dig into each that might fit your situation looking for people's props and gripes about them. Edited to add the HN link since commenters mentioned other services.

I'd go with Chargebee and then merchant accounts can be hot swapped

Wow, this is fantastic -- can't count the number of "free hosting" sites that are disappointing because they don't have a database. Well done! I may try it out.

What's the point of having a database for a static site though?

1. To store the site content in 2. To store metadata that gets integrated into the generated site 3. To record stats/metadata about the site generation

There's probably other scenarios people can think of.

Check out https://chat.1mb.site and https://forum.1mb.site which are 2 example apps using a 1MB database. Using nothing but JavaScript :)

Thank you! I really hope you try it out :)

If you want to upgrade your account check out: https://pro.1mb.site - For a one-time $100 payment you’ll get access to 1MB Pro forever and help support an indie project. Monthly cost will be $5 a month when I implement my new payment processor. Until then only lifetime purchases are possible.

lifetime for as long as the developer decides to maintain the service?

The combination of revenue between lifetime and monthly subscriptions actually far outweigh hosting costs after I hit an easily obtainable customer number. Granted I’ll need to scale my server in time this is actually a sustainable business / I understand being skeptical of “forever”. If you were paying $5 a month it would be $60 a year, in under 2 years you’re already making your money back

It’s rarely about the cost and more about the level of effort to maintain said service. Without a plan in place it’s hard to accept “it Shouldn’t lose money” as valid proof that you won’t grow bored of this in 1...2...5...10 years. Also, more lucrative things may come up and take up your time, making running this current service unappealing or impossible.

My point is $100 is about a year and a half of monthly 1MB Pro payments, so you only need to bank on 1MB lasting a year and a half at least not “forever” to get your money’s worth (and you’re supporting an indie project). Anyways I’ve added a disclaimer: “Forever or for the life of the project. 1MB isn't going anywhere, but we also can't predict the future. No refunds!“

I honestly can't imagine anyone paying $60 a year for what you're offering. Sorry to be negative, and I wish you the best, but the person that suggested that amount is someone you shouldn't listen to a second time. You're either going to have to figure out how to provide more value or cut the price.

I appreciate your concern but I already have paying customers

Okay, but to be honest that completely misses the point. I'm about as willing to pay for this as anyone out there, and if I drank coffee I'd have spit out my coffee when I saw the price. The fact that you currently have some paying customers now doesn't change that.

Good luck!

I think it’s a very reasonable price to pay for a quality indie service :) one that is constantly worked on with love by me :)

How do I export my content as zip to local ? Is this possible ?

Not possible but I’ll add that to my development roadmap :)

would be great, thanks

I haven't tried this yet but it reminds me of the spirit of GeoCities.

For years now I've been hoping that one day the wheel of internet trends will roll back around and make personally-designed webpages a thing again instead of this bland "social media" landscape.

Check out neocities.org

This looks super cool! And I love that this is run by an indie dev and not some VC-backed startup or big corporation.

Definitely bookmarking this so that I can come back to it and see what I can build once I have time.

Thank you! :)

Awesome service! Thanks for making it available.

A small comment: In the 'Edit Site' page, the preview is reloading with every keystroke. Would it be better to make it refresh on the click of a button?

I wanted it to be live feedback, but it is kind of distracting. I’ll add that to my development roadmap! Thanks for using my service :)

Awesome work, I will introduce this to my kid. With the built-in database/kv-store and excellent UX, I can't think of a better platform to get started with web development.

How does your kid like 1MB?

He's mostly concerned with the learning curve of HTML and CSS, so I'd say that it's a success so far - no tooling got in the way of his learning. We haven't gotten to using the database yet...

This is great and incredibly useful.

Quick note:

Google sites requires 2 nameservers and because of that I am not able to point the site to my domain.

Love the simplicity and custom domains. I often use glitch [1] but will give 1MB a go as custom domains is difficult with Glitch.

Side note, your footer on mobile is missing some items unless you release you can swipe across - which is not obvious.

[1] https://glitch.com

It’s a horizontal scrolling menu by design let me think of how to make it more obvious, as I see what you mean

Looks great! Please make a plan how to deal with abuse; in the past, most services that provided low-friction hosting stopped being low friction (e.g. they started requiring login with a facebook account), presumably to cut down on abuse (like phishers creating lots of accounts to host phishing sites).

This is going to be a real problem and it is hard for small sites to tackle this. I have simple service (https://liveformhq.com) which allowed users to sign up for an account with a free 1 month trial and it didn't ask for your credit card upfront. Everything was fine until a few months ago when people started signing up and setting up phishing forms (I had the registration form behind recaptcha). At the end I had to move the credit card form to the front to stop these bad actors (and even after this I had 1 guy set up a phishing form which I promptly shut off after an abuse report). The amount of effort spent to handle bad actors is really a terrible thing for the current SaaS apps. And, it ends up making the UX for the good users bad :(

In the past I ended abuse by adding that recaptcha to registration form. I’m recruiting volunteer moderators as we speak :)

That may stop automated abuse but ultimately that's less of a concern.

What if one of your users gets lucky and traffic goes huge for one site? Everybody else gets 503's? Have you planned/designed for such scenario?

I have a fair use bandwidth policy. You can’t abuse it.

You mean: if passed certain traffic threshold a particular site gets automatically blocked, or, you hope your users will be fair?

Let's say that given your service is free and with custom domain, a journalist uses it to publish 100k worth of revealing docs in whistlerblower.com. Then a government acts and directs a DDOs to it. What will happen to that site? To other sites?

Cool! But I can’t see anything on the site about who is behind this. Did I just miss it or is it missing?

Especially when a service is free, I want to know a little about who I’m getting involved with.

Edit: what’s the deal with the downvotes? It’s entirely reasonable to ask who is behind a service.

Hello my name is Dalton Edwards and I’ve been building this project for over half a year. I’m sorry I didn’t make that clearer (I do link to my personal site in the footer). I’ll write a bio about myself on the homepage.

Hello :) thanks. I’m excited by the project and I think transparency is important.

Good on ya, and good luck. Looks like a great project.

Three suggestions:

1. please dont have "forever" pricing. i would rather pay a higher fee monthly.

2. please have tiers according to size and bandwidth requirements

3. Instead of creating your own cli, etc. Could you integrate with Gatsbyjs ? In fact, your killer feature could be a wysiwyg editor for Gatsby

I would strongly prefer an open standard like Graphql over a custom nosql you have. You can implement it at your end using something like https://hasura.io/ or something.

this is killer if it happens. You are basically netlify+gatsbyjs+contentful rolled into one. I could never figure out why netlify and contentful dont support the features of the other.


Well, I would disagree. Forever pricing would be awesome.

I've gotten forever accounts with shodan and a very popular vpn service, I was half expecting the service quality to at least diminish after a year or two around the positive return mark but didn't happen. They've outperformed my expectations dramatically.

This forum thread scares me: https://forum.1mb.site/?t=1556326142930

GET requests never affecting state is backend web dev 101.

There's nothing like this even though it seems like there is. Great job.

Thank you! :)

This is very cool! I'm currently using Netlify to host tiny sites for non profits and local candidates. I love Netlify, but this would be an interesting alternative. Being able to edit in the browser could also be a big deal to allow some of them to edit their own pages. Netlify has forms but they are pretty limited (100 submissions per month on the free plan). I'll definitely give you a try when the next one comes around. Being able to store a little data is another really big plus.

Is the 1MB name a reference to data limit? I couldn't see anything saying so but that's what sprang to mind.

I like it. Some people have expressed concerns about yet another platform which holds your data. I don't actually have a problem with that as long as you can leave without being penalized. A good way to alleviate those concerns might be a feature where you could download all of your site data along with a guide to setting it up self hosted.

You get 1MB of storage. Don’t be discouraged though most users don’t even come close to using it all. You can delete all your data from my server at any time.

It displays as garbage on my system (Linux, Firefox 66.0.3): https://screenshots.firefox.com/loCbaBtgGVqoUYeh/1mb.site

somewhat better with Chromium but weird nonetheless: http://i.imgur.com/1IbVXEQ.png

I’m at a loss for words does anybody else want to weigh in?

Why is it called 1MB? Is it a reference to the maximum storage you get? It'd be interesting for size optimized sites.

Also are the sites supposed to look that big? https://i.imgur.com/QIRNATC.jpg (sorry for shitty photo quality, my phone is ancient... i took a photo instead of a screenshot to show how big it looks physically)

It’s called 1MB because free members get 1 megabyte of storage. You build your site from scratch or use a template. That’s just how I chose to make my site look

So i tried it out: https://badsector.1mb.site/ (this is something i made a few years ago, i didn't make it now :-P)

The UI looks a bit too big on my monitor, but other than that it is nice for small stuff. I think it needs some way to upload multiple files from the browser via upload dialog and/or dragdrop (like imgur does, for example).

Also i found the editor autocompleting the closing tag very annoying! Also a bit annoying was the "smart" autoindentation (autoindent is fine of course, but trying to be smart clashes with how i'd indent things).

Anyway, good luck with it :-).

I want to upgrade and support this project. But I am not sure if this is a scam :) should I wait before doing this ? Any thoughts ?

This project is ran by a guy named Dalton (me), not by some big company with lots of funding. When you upgrade to Pro you’re helping offset hosting costs and validating the countless hours I spend developing this project. 1MB has been featured on Product Hunt twice: https://producthunt.com/posts/1mbsite & https://producthunt.com/posts/1mbsite-v2, has over 300 followers on Twitter https://twitter.com/1mbsite, and is hosting over 1,100 sites at the time of writing. What’s my point? 1MB is trusted by many :)

I have been looking for something like this! My use case is a minimal CMS back-end and admin interface.

Basically adding some dynamic content to a otherwise static site that the user(s) can change themselves.

The 1mb site would be an admin interface for changing the content in the DB, the 1mb DB serving the content to the front-end hosted elsewhere.

I'll have to try this out. Very cool.

Thank you! :) I hope you like 1MB

I love this so much. I would be so happy if this kicked off another round of blogs and brought us back to the sharing economy.

Thank you! :) that would be awesome and anything is possible when it’s this easy to get online

This looks really cool! It seems like it's just what I've been looking for lately, without realizing it. Will look more into this when I get back from vacation. Thanks for sharing and showing.

Looks succinct and minimalistly practical. Is it totally open-source in the sense that I can replicate the 1mb.site on my own server using 3-4 the repos published on Github?

Thank you! You can’t self-host 1MB, but we do offer some open source software on our repo at https://GitHub.com/1MB


Fair enough! I just can’t make all my hard work open source.. I’m trying to build a business. There’s a time and a place for open source, and I’d only be helping my competitors as an indie developer.


With all due respect, your "business" is static web hosting, which is not exactly a revolutionary or paradigm shifting concept. There's likely little to no competitive advantage in any of the code you've written, or disadvantage to open sourcing it (although it's understandable if you don't want to open source it, then be left on the hook to maintain it.)

It's fine if you want to try to make money with a passion project, but as far as the market is concerned, you already lost the race to social media and the cloud before you even started. You're not actually competing with anyone in any meaningful sense, any more than Hacker News is competing with Reddit.

If my concept was easy to implement they wouldn’t be asking me to open source it :) 1MB is over half a year of hard word I only make it look easy

It's a static file host with a nosql database and a text editor. There's a very clear migration path if you don't want to use their service.

and LetsEncrypt out of the box, which is gravy

Very refreshing to see a come back of simple, static websites.

Thank you!

I tried using this today. I couldn't find a way to rename the site I signed up for; I didn't make the connection that the username would be the URL/site name. I also couldn't delete my primary site to create a replacement, so I had to close my account just to create a site with a new name. Just thought I'd let y'all know a minor inconvenience I ran into.

I’ll make it more obvious on registration that the name can’t be changed :) I’m sorry about that. I’d add a username change option but it would actually require a lot of updates to the backend

Am I supposed to see something here?


“Securely access a NoSQL database using nothing but JavaScript

With permissions, enforced fields, and the ability to get the logged in 1MB username you can easily create a dynamic application. Check out chat.1mb.site and forum.1mb.site which are both applications that utilize a 1MB database.

Click here to read the API documentation.” looks like inspect element lol

This looks really neat! Seems perfect for those set-and-forget, single purpose type websites. Maybe I'll move https://xkcd.wtf over to you!

The only question is: how long will you be able to run this? There have been so many free webhosts that shut down over night, my confidence in any hosting project is limited

I’ve been running 1MB for over half a year and it’s my passion project. I’m constantly improving and adding new features to it. 1MB makes money from Pro upgrades it’s just temporarily unavailable. I want to run this project for years to come. https://pro.1mb.site

Love it!

Also, you said the magic words...

What are the magic words? Are they "Abracadabra", "Alakazam" or "Open Sesame" perhaps?


The magic words are: "Passion Project".

In any marketplace, there are 800lb Gorillas, medium players, and "Passion Projects".

I tend to root for the "Passion Project", having several of my own.

I mean, this is America, right, many of us root for the underdog, right?

Good luck with your "Passion Project"! May it grow and grow! (Also, realize that as it does, it will attract more and more criticism -> criticism = barometer of fame and indicator of success, that's criticism's secret identity, just so you know in advance! <g>)

Thank you! :)

half a year isn't /that/ long.

I do wish for you to succeed, so I'll keep my fingers crossed! ;-)

All companies start at 1 day old. 1MB isn’t going anywhere.

I had a similar idea, with storage limit of a classic 1.44MB floppy disk. Imagine an entire website which fits in a floppy disk.

Could this be used to create a niche CRM? I've got someone asking me to develop a CRM for them in their business domain.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but if you can build it with JavaScript and a NoSQL database than yes :)

Could you contrast this with Netlify? I believe they are in the same segment but I haven't used either.

Netlify doesn't have a database

As far as I’m aware Netlify doesn’t offer a code editor in your browser. 1MB is geared towards simplicity but is able to be technical also.

I haven't personally used it, so I don't know its limits, but Netlify offers an OSS CMS tool that you have to setup and configure yourself on your own static site.


Boils down to the same answer as GitHub+Hugo argument. No installation required to use 1MB

Congratulations on your HN success.

Having that built in DB is a killer feature to me.

Does the DB prevent hackers from overwriting keys?

1MB databases with public write permissions don’t let you overwrite keys :)


"I'm An ..."

You're a what?

An. It's a name.

Though I'll admit I was confused as well until I saw the twitter handle.

Nice work! A small question: even though I'm a real person always logged in on Google, the recaptcha you've used makes me click few photos for free ... Is it a setting you control when you put that plugin in your website, or Google does everything itself?

No, site owners do not control what challenge you receive from Recaptcha.

Yeah, my question was more about 'how many' than 'what'. There is no question Google doesn't think I'm not a real person, it still shows me two to three pages of image clicking making me its worker robot for free.

Great service. Use it since it's online for my little Job Board Listing: https://altafino.1mb.site/ Up in seconds, easy if you know basics of html.

If you can make a chat app, I am not sure you need to say static, it’s static + optionally dynamic.

Looks good.

I refer to it as static hosting because even when using a 1MB database you’re querying it with JavaScript. Also databases are a new addition to 1MB so I’m at this weird crossroads where I don’t know if it’s static hosting anymore. Thank you!

You might consider hitching your wagon to the term "JAMStack"... I have been playing with Hugo and the experience is great.

Very cool default site page...! (Eg your page not found page or putting IP in browser)

Thank you :)

How does it work in terms of security? If I make my sites' database writeable by authenticated users, doesn't in mean that any authenticated client can send a request to delete all records?

The db-delete endpoint always requires your API key no matter if read or write permissions are enabled.

I tried to deploy a Hugo static site to 1mb, and while it rendered fine on localhost, it would display text only on 1mb. Is this feasible, and what could I be doing wrong?

1MB doesn’t support directories at the time of writing.. did your Hugo site make use of directories? Or another thing I can think of is if you’re trying to make a single page site make a 200.html file (it’ll replace index.html and all requests to nonexistent files will go to 200.html)

Thank you for getting back to me! It is definitely caused by directories; I didn't see anything about that in the 1mb documentation (or skimmed and missed it), so I figured I just had settings wrong. Thank you!

Any sort of git/GitHub integration features (or planned) ? Eg, I saw mention of code/theme editor, and working git into that would make some sense.

How would that Git implementation look to you?

I think most would expect to just have a remote Git repo where you can push your site to. That would then do a checkout on the web server automatically.

Precisely this! 1MB is perfect for a small "hosting" company putting other small companies online, e.g. John's bakery. A git deploy functionality would drastically improve automation to manage websites. I know the provided cli can do it, but it's a other thing to integrate.

In the GitHub integration, it could watch for changes in a repository (there's a webhook for that) and then 1mbsite would fetch the files and deploy them.

Git integration is like Heroku. The user types `git push 1mbsite master` and 1mbsite would publish it.

Pro members can host up to 5 websites per account now :) https://pro.1mb.site

Dang, this is awesome. I love everything about this.

Thank you! Hope you find 1MB useful :)

Looks great. Now on my to-do list to build something using it. Well done and wish you every success with this as a business.

Thank you! I really hope you find 1MB useful :)

This is really fucking cool.

Thank you! :) it’s a project built with lots of love

Looks nice. But what does it provide over Github/GitLab pages?

If you don’t understand Git you can use 1MB. When you log in you get access to a code editor in your browser. It has lots of features to help get you online fast. 1MB is meant to be an easy to use tool, but it does offer advanced deployment options too via API and CLI. Also it has a NoSQL database unlike GitHub and GitLab Pages.

I think it’s probably easier for some people.

Or Firebase static hosting.

Have you considered using OpenID authentication?

I don't know why everyone is being so negative in the comments so far. It's really discouraging to other people who want to share something they made. It makes me sad.

OP: This is cool. It's not meant to replace Netlify or GH Pages or a million other things, and I understand that. Some people just want to make something and you made something. You've done more than so many people here by just releasing something and that's something to take great pride in. I don't have a use for it personally, but I think it's really cool and I took a look at the code to see what was going on. I found it neat.

Ignore and excuse everyone that's expecting a multi-million dollar product from you.

Everyone else: If you're genuinely asking "what's the point of this?" or "why's it free? who are you? why should I trust you?" or "what does this do that Netlify or GH Pages doesn't" — let's get real for a minute: Not everything is meant to compete with these services, or any service. There are a hundred-thousand products that exist on the internet with very happy users that you and I have never heard of. This bias that everything needs to be "the one" that we all use is discouraging, isn't the goal of this community, and isn't in the hacker spirit. It's fine to be skeptical and curious, but don't be a downer or shame.

This is show and tell: Timmy brought a rock he thinks is cool, Cassie brought her mom's diamonds, and Shaun brought a 2Pac album. Don't yuck other people's yums.

I hear ya. The tone / atmosphere on HN can be underwhelming at times.

One of the main reasons I show up here is to see what others are charing. That said, those doing Show HN should probably scan some other Show HN's to get a sense of what people are looking for.

- What is it? High level. - Why should I care? That is, what's in it for me. - Along the same lines, benefits (not features) - What is it? Deeper, the technology behind it. - What makes it different (and perhaps better)? - If it free, assure me (or not) I'm not the product. - Along the same lines, be upfront about what you might do - or not - with any data using the product might provide. - Why? Why did you do this? There's a difference between launching some cookie cutter product and a side project for learning / exploring.

When I get around to it, I'm going to do a proper blog post on this list.

Nice summary. Bookmarked.

I wouldn't mind if you pasted this at the top of every Show HN. On the other hand, sometimes it's useful to point out similar things that exist. Maybe the author actually didn't know about those things and would like to! Criticism always requires walking a fine line being constructive or being discouraging. It's even harder with strangers whose intentions and motivations you don't know!

I don’t mind when people bring up these arguments I’m here for a healthy discussion and to let everybody know that 1MB will help you get your site online fast.

Hear, hear!


- Anton Ego (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ratatouille)

I use physical world analogies:

The existence of another sandwich shop, even a successful and tasty one, doesn't mean I can't open up one of my own - or that my sandwiches need be exposed to constant criticism for lacking some arbitrary ingredient such as, say, tarragon or sage. Not all websites need to offer the digital equivalent of say beansprouts with hollandaise spread even if you really like that (it sounds magnificent tbh).

Nor do they need a new spin on sandwiches or a new innovation in sandwichcraft. All they need is to execute well: offer fair prices, quality service, and use decent ingredients. That's quite enough. It's not the French Laundry, ok fine, who cares?

We are at a point of tech where people are opening up internet sandwich shops. That's fine. A well executed me-too nothing-new thing is totally absolutely fine. The internet is big enough for all of us. Have a good time and enjoy building stuff.

At this point I'm wary of hauling the old Dropbox example, having learned that the author has acknowledged his mistake in being prematurely dismissive. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988051)

Regarding 1MB: looks like a good idea for teaching people how to get a simple website on the web. Like many here, I grew up in the age of Geocities and similar services.

I'm happy to have high quality services like Netlify available for me, but we need more indie services to serve as entry points for newcomers. Netlify and co. may change; we're already centralizing development workflows too much (e.g. GitHub).

More power to small creators using their resources to open up spaces for other creators.

That’s a good point - the attitude of “how is this any better than X, just use X” is one of the reasons why the web is so centralized.

But the attitude of "can you compare it with X?" is fine, and is what most of those comments are actually doing.

The reason why the web is centralized is that people use other people's computers to host instead of their own. Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now. Hosting a simple static site is easy and works well.

If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.

> Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now.

Uh... Down maybe. Up... We're not quite there yet. Rural America (sometimes just a few miles outside a major city) can have <5meg down and under 0.5meg up. During non-peak hours that is.

Also, sadly, many ISPs dislike you serving stuff from your own home.


Hardly. 2 megabytes/s download, around 120 kilobytes/s upload - my upload speed barely even reaches one megabit.

And it's from a dynamic IP, and connectivity drops off randomly once a month.

Could I host a static site on my own computer, with a little fiddling? Sure. Even a dynamic one. And it would be slow as molasses, and it would probably get denial'o'service-d if getting ten visitors at the same time.

I did it on dynamic IP connections with far less upstream for more than a decade. Luckily I've had 5-10 megabit up for another decade on top of that and it's even easier now. But it's certainly possible and even easy on limited connections. We're not talking 56k here. Also, limiting bandwidth to some appropriate value is also not hard.

And so what if your websites goes offline for a few hours a handful of times a year? Or even a week. It doesn't matter. This isn't some profit driven job.


This reads as condemning someone because of the actions of others. Like if I said to you: If I hire you, you'll just steal my source code like Levandowski did when he was at Google.

I don't think anyone would appreciate the second statement.. but you seem eager to condemn the motivations of this project without learning a single thing about the founder and his ethics or motivations.

I don't need to know anything about the founder or his ethics. Once popularity brings in money only having one set of rules will always create a highly censored environment. Self-hosting bypasses this by allowing many sets of rules.

Everyone saying that 100KB/s upload isn't enough to host a static site that is under <1MB in size is either ignorant or intentionally disingenuous. I was hosting my static site from home on far less than that for a decade.

> how is this any better than X

This is called switching cost and it's a challenge for any new business in an established market.

Consumers ask themselves this question constantly and it's something you need to be prepared to answer if you want people to use your service instead of X.

I'm currently using Netlify for free static hosting. How is 1MB any better than Netlify?

I talked about this a little here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772530

Thank you for your kind words! :)

You're welcome.

While I have you: What itch lead you to build this? What did you draw inspiration from?

I feel like there’s a lot of tools out there to simplify web development but none that do it how I wanted them to. I don’t want a drag-and-drop builder and I don’t want a command line only interface (although we offer one - the key is choices). I want to be able to easily code right inside my browser.

> I feel like there’s a lot of tools out there to [...] but none that do it how I wanted them to.

That’s as good a reason as any. Similar reasons to that are why there have been some large changes in the way people use computers at all.

Nice work and good luck

Thank you! :)

I agree with your points, but can you link to the specific comments on this HN post that you think were made as disingenuous criticisms? I read through all the comments just now, and none of them seem to have any degree of antagonism or unfairness at all, not even the ones that (quite respectfully & dispassionately) ask to know how it is different than possible alternatives (and the 1mb creator does a nice job replying to them too).

The comments here all look quite reasonable & polite. Maybe I am missing something? I can’t see any comment that warrants you to have posted this here (though, again, I agree with all your points).


Your comment breaks both the site guidelines and the Show HN rules. Would you mind reading them and following them in the future?



He could have put "Show HN" in the title. But you seem unaware that this is one of the functions of this website. In fact, there's an entire section for it with a link in the header: https://news.ycombinator.com/show

Show HN is suppose to be helpful criticism and feedback. Calling it a "shittier product" is entirely uncalled for. Not just for the language, but because it's entirely unconstructive. It helps no one.

I apologize for not using the proper title. I was unaware.

We've added it.

I’m curious, when a young person, a friend, or an inexperienced developer at your company asks for your opinion about something they’ve made, do you respond with: it’s a shittier product that other people have done better?

Thanks for sharing your unfounded opinion. Also in regards to posting my product somewhere where people are looking for it.. Hacker News was obviously the right choice with all these upvotes and site traffic ;)

Great job!

Hard to see what this offers beyond a simple GitHub+Hugo combo.

For starters unlike Hugo you don’t have to install 1MB

What can you really do with 1 megabyte? Clearly nothing serious. Why suggest it's free then? Neocities provides 1GB which is actually a relevant amount.

You’re entitled to your opinion. Please check out the featured sites on homepage. All of them with the exception of some Pro sites (which get 1GB) were made with only 1MB of storage. Most users don’t even come close to reaching 1 megabyte. Not to mention you can link to external stylesheets and scripts...

My Neocities site is still under 1KB I think. If you're writing HTML/CSS by hand it has no reason to get really big.

> What can you really do with 1 megabyte?

A ton. It's more than enough.

What can one do with 140 character limits?

1mb is like 200,000 words. That's a lot of content

OVH also offers a 10MB free hosting with Let's Encrypt for every domain, probably more reliable

Alright I found the link. OVH’s 10MB plan only has 1 GB of monthly bandwidth while 1MB’s is unmetered (fair use - don’t abuse). OVH’s 10MB plan doesn’t give you access to a database while 1MB gives you access to a secure NoSQL database. In closing they have more storage but they make up for that by taking away some core functionality that 1MB offers. https://www.ovh.co.uk/domains/start10m_hosting_offer.xml

Soft promises ("unlimited, don't abuse") make me nervous because they are not clear.

Is making the front page of HN and doing 50gb in one day "abuse"?

I’m not going to ban a popular site. I have a fair amount of bandwidth. I’m only going to ban a site who purposely abuses resources

The one time I got banned from a free service being considered abuse was 7TB of bandwidth in a month.

Probably not.

But if you're hitting the frontpage twice a month, probably time to pay for a plan.

Isn't that assuming that you buy your domain from OVH: https://www.ovh.co.uk/domains/start10m_hosting_offer.xml

Can you send me a link to that so I can send my counter points?
