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Samuel Aondo
Samuel Aondo

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I Built "Drop a Zip, Get a Live Site" Hosting

Most static hosting today assumes you're comfortable with git pushes, build configs, and a CLI.

That's fine for a lot of us, but there's a large group of people — freelancers sending client previews, hackathon teams, anyone exporting from a static site generator — who just want to turn a folder into a URL with zero setup.

I built ZipHost around exactly that constraint: zip a folder, drop it, get a live URL with SSL in under 4 seconds.

The deploy flow

  1. You zip your project folder the normal way (Finder, Explorer, or a build script)
  2. Drag it into the dashboard or run one CLI command
  3. It's unpacked, provisioned across edge nodes, and live at yourproject.ziphost.co with SSL already active

Average deploy-to-live time is under 4 seconds. Every deploy is versioned, so rollback is one click — no rebuilding, no re-uploading, just reverting to a previous numbered deploy.

What's under the hood

  • Edge-distributed serving across 190 locations, so a deploy is fast to reach globally, not just fast to publish

  • Deploy previews with password protection — useful for client review before something goes live publicly

  • Optional git integration for people who do want to wire it into a push-based flow (it zips the build output automatically on push), without forcing that workflow on everyone else

The part I'm building now: PHP support

The biggest gap in pure static hosting is anything that needs server-side execution.

I'm extending ZipHost to support PHP alongside static files — containerized per-site (PHP-FPM + nginx, resource-capped) so a ZIP with a PHP backend can go live the same way a static export does, without needing to manage a VPS or configure a runtime by hand.

If you've got a static site (or, soon, a PHP one) that just needs to exist somewhere without a deployment pipeline: https://ziphost.co — happy to hear from other devs on what's missing from the CLI or the deploy previews.

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