Wow, this is really inspiring. I see that she's hosting them all on her personal domain, but I have a question, if anyone has an answer. What's the easiest/most cost-effective way to host a large number of sites on different domains?
Learn how to use a VPS? Static pages with NearlyFreeSpeech? I've got a zillion ideas (and after seeing this, will be building them soon) but they need to be on separate domains. Paying $5/month or whatever for each is obviously not optimal.
- Create a bucket for each website, named after the domain (e.g. "myproject.mysite.com")
- Turn on static website hosting for the bucket (through the AWS Console)
- Go to your DNS provider and create a "CNAME" record pointing "myproject.mysite.com" to "myproject.mysite.com.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com" (The AWS Console will give you the exact domain to use here)
- For super-easy deployment, use s3cmd's sync utility (http://s3tools.org/s3cmd-sync) to upload all changed files in your project:
TLDR is "create a separate directory for each site with the directory being called the URL of the site" e.g. /var/htdocs/www.domain1.com has the web pages for http://www.domain1.com/ .
If you're at all familiar with the command line / Linux, then VPS could be an easy way to go if you don't expect a lot of traffic. Nginx is easy to configure for this kind of thing: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11778085/1301376
The minor downside is that you'll be responsible for keeping your server up to date, but with a bit of upfront work you can mostly automate it.
No one can give you an honest answer because we do not know what type of resources all of your ideas will consume.
If you are really interested in learning, pick up a VPS. Running one is as easy as you WANT it to be. Configuring and managing your VPS optimally is dependent on your projects and your goals. It can get complex pretty fast, especially when you don't know what you are doing.
After studying about them in my spare time I have learned how severely insecure most people allow themselves to be. Fair warning to you!
Leverage Apache with vhosts if you're dealing with dynamic websites, and if the sites are all static it might be even easier to host in a bunch of S3 buckets.
Gandi simplehosting is hard to beat if you're hosting a lot of static pages from different domains. $30/year if you've already got domains registered with them. I've used it for a couple of things, and for the cost/realiability/simplicity when using gandi domains (which are granted a bit expensive) Ive been very happy with it.
I would definitely recommend getting a VPS, learning how to manage one from the command line will be a fun learning experience in and of itself—and will make you a stronger developer in the process. I would recommend Linode. They have an excellent knowledgebase with guides and tutorials to help you get started.
You'd have to register each domain. For hosting, you could try to find a free plan, like Heroku, and point the domain there. Or you could buy a VPS or dedicated server. I had a Windows dedicated server once for projects like this, but it was just too expensive to keep.
Learn how to use a VPS? Static pages with NearlyFreeSpeech? I've got a zillion ideas (and after seeing this, will be building them soon) but they need to be on separate domains. Paying $5/month or whatever for each is obviously not optimal.