lastupdate.site

Hand-rolled

Migrating a hand-rolled site to static

Some of the best-aging sites on the web are pure HTML, written by their owners in the early 2000s and barely touched since. They're fast, semantic, and small. They're also stuck on whatever shared host the owner set up in 2008.

Migration candidate · €600 flat

What Hand-rolled HTML / PHP is

Hand-rolled sites are written directly in HTML/CSS, sometimes with light PHP for shared headers and footers. No CMS, no database, no admin panel. Just files.

Hand-rolled sites are the easiest migrations we do. There's no CMS to wrestle, no plugin layer to flatten, no admin panel to retire. We crawl the site, copy the files, and put them on Cloudflare. Berkshire Hathaway's site (yes, that one) is in this category.

If your hand-rolled site has a few PHP includes — a header.inc.php, a footer template — those render to HTML the same way and we capture the rendered output. The result is identical to what visitors currently see, on faster infrastructure.

What to know before migrating

  • If your site has a server-side form handler (PHP mail()), it needs a static replacement (Cloudflare Forms, Formspree).
  • If you have a 'last updated' line that auto-renders, we make it static. You can email us when you want it updated.
  • If there's a PHP include for the navigation, the rendered output preserves it but the include itself is gone.

Stays the same

  • Every URL, including .html and .htm extensions
  • Every file, structured as it is today
  • Every link, both internal and external
  • Visual design — exactly

What changes

  • No more shared-hosting bill
  • No more 'PHP version is being upgraded next month' email
  • No more SSL renewal (Cloudflare provides it free, automatically)

Our take

Hand-rolled sites are why static hosting still wins for content. The original instinct of the people who built them — keep it simple, keep it portable — is exactly the philosophy we're built around.

Questions

My site has FrontPage extensions enabled. Will those work?

FrontPage extensions are a server-side feature for editing — they don't affect what visitors see. We capture the rendered output, which is plain HTML. Editing happens through us going forward.

It's just static HTML, why do I need to pay anything?

Because you're still paying $5–20/month somewhere for hosting. Our €600 buys you out of that bill forever. If you're already self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi for free, you don't need us.

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