Will static Web sites and their generation and hosting become a popular trend?

(This article also published in my public number "dotnet daily Essence article", Welcome to the right QR code to pay attention to. )

Preface: This question is my recent work, has been thinking about the content, today and everyone to share and discuss my views.

Defined

Static Web site: The entire site is composed only of static content (Html\css\js\images ... ) consists of direct content sent to the client by the server, instead of rendering the final HTML to the client by the server when the request is received by the Dynamic Web technology (whether Asp\jsp\php\django\ror\nodejs).

Static Web Site Builder: A technique for generating static Web sites based on dynamic content. Typically, a template markup Language (or specification) is used to generate the final static site content from the template engine. Now the most popular static website generation technology is probably Jekyll.

Static Web site Generation service: Provides a SaaS service that enables users to run static site builders in a cloud service instead of on-premises. Allows users to easily continue to deliver their own static website. That is, the user simply edits the content, commits the changes, and the static site generation service automatically refreshes the static site.

Static web Hosting Services: The biggest difference from the general web hosting service is that it only hosts static content. And now the world's largest static website generation service and hosting service should be GitHub pages.

Why

Static web site has always existed, it can be said that the first form of the World Wide Web is static website, why now say to become a popular trend?

I think it's a couple of reasons:

1. The rapid development of modern browsers and front-end technologies has led to a more and more simple backend functionality, especially with the advent of more rich Web apps angular and react, where the backend only needs to host static content and provide data APIs.
2. The continuous delivery technology and the automation scripting technology behind it are becoming more and more sophisticated, simplifying a large number of tasks that need to be handled manually before, for deployment.
3. Now the number of customers who need to serve the site is increasing, and the geographical distribution is more and more wide, the use of dynamic Web technology faces more challenges
4. Of course, the Dynamic Web technology security issues highlighted, but also make the static page advantage obvious. For example, "12 million Drupal sites need urgent patching".

From the Google Trend chart below, we can also see that the search trend of static site builder has grown sharply since 2013, especially in 2015.

In addition, there is an article in Infoq called "static website builder will be the next big hit", and this trend is described in detail, introducing a startup company, Netlify, who specializes in static web hosting in Silicon Valley. Even a New York-based Enterprise collaboration SaaS service provider, WeWork, has migrated its entire site to a static site using static website generators and hosted it in Netlify, and wrote an article to share their experience. Why wework.com uses a static Generator and why you should too ".

Advantage

The characteristics of static Web sites determine that it has a natural high performance, especially the whole station can be used to accelerate the use of CDN, then more quickly. Of course, the dynamic part of a static web site (the part that is processed by JS calling the backend API) relies on the responsiveness of the backend API.

Because static sites do not render page results on the server, some security vulnerabilities to the Dynamic web framework do not affect them. Of course, the security of the server and the security and mechanism of the data API are still necessary.

At the same time, because the static Web site for the server load is very low, then the cost of hosting can be very low. In my preliminary design, for example, a website that does not have a CDN quota of 10G space can be as low as 2 RMB/month, and there is no problem with the business model of free value added.

Subsequent

At the technical and implementation level (build services and managed services), I've also done some research recently, and I've got some preliminary ideas, and now I'm doing some technical prototyping validation. With the initial results, a more technical-oriented sharing will be carried out. If you have any thoughts on static website, please comment and chat with me.

Will static Web sites and their generation and hosting become a popular trend?