Question about the best option to get my friend's business site live and running

So, I’m almost done building a generic static site for my friend’s small business using html, css, jquery. And I am wondering what the best option is to get this site out to the public. He currently has a site for his business, which he built himself using wix.com, but is now interested in using the site I built for him. I don’t believe Wix takes custom code from scratch, so I was thinking of transferring his current domain name to a host like hostgator. Would this be a smart move? Are there any other better web server hosts out there? Thanks!

If it’s just static, you can get free hosting from GitHub Pages or Surge and get the domain name to point to it.

I have a related question: if a business’s website is hosted using GitHub Pages and its code is open sourced (say, under the BSD-3 Clause), how does the business owner protect certain assets (company logo, app icons, etc.) included in the repo? Put an all-rights-reserved notice in the assets folder?

I am not a lawyer, et cetera:

Just because something is hosted on GitHub, it doesn’t mean it HAS to be free of meaningful copyright. Technically anything hosted without a specific licence is understood to maintain “All Rights Reserved”. See here for details: https://choosealicense.com/no-license/

For separate assets, you may prefer to keep their original copyright information with them, or state the copyright status of logos etc in the README.md for the repo. Businesses have to maintain their own trademarks and whatnot, so it’s not like someone can just come along and claim your logo because it happened to be in a public repo. You might also keep your assets off of GitHub and have them hosted via AWS or something instead, just to avoid any confusion if the repo was otherwise open-source.

That said, the core tenet of GitHub is that public repos can be forked and remixed, so the underlying code would be remixable by the general public, even if it were not strictly legal. Still, with no licence selected, you would presumably be the one with the law on your side.

You could use a private repo and avoid the drama all together, or you could use Surge, which does not provide access to your repo or allow forking.

For a static site, personally, I wouldn’t be too fussed about all the code for my site being available on GitHub, since all the code for my site is available with a quick ‘view source’ anyway :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I don’t know too much about github pages and surge. I’m going to have to look into it. Thanks for the suggestion!

I think you should make the site Public so people can use it and see how it goes.
Unless your still in like the beta of the site.

And tell people about the site to get people to use it.
I’ll help if needed.
I’m going for a MMORPG Game if you can help just saying.

Yes do it if your friend thinks you should.