The Static Web: Our Next Generation

Sometimes ideas occur first slowly, then all at once. As we built Divshot, this is what we discovered:

1. Separating the front-end from the back-end forces better code architecture and increases flexibility.
2. No static web hosting platform existed that offered the developer-friendly features we've come to expect.

We explored options for our own use, and eventually realized that Divshot could be (and should be) that platform. Our moment of clarity led to months of work which culminate today with the Divshot static web hosting platform.

Believing in the Static Web

The front-end has come a long way in the past few years. Advancements in browser technology combined with frameworks such as Angular and Ember have made rich and interactive apps the new normal. These static apps are powerful and seamlessly coordinate with many back-end services. The number of things static web apps can't do is shrinking by the day.

While mature tools exist for building static apps, we realized that hosting was far behind. Sure, you can push to S3 and then manually hook that up to a CDN, but what about pushState URLs? What about rollbacks? Where was the static web host that just takes care of the hard stuff?

Static Web Hosting for Developers

Developer productivity is the focus of Divshot hosting. We want you to build your application, not configure CDN pull zones or fiddle with deploy scripts. We want to give you control of what matters and take care of the rest.

We built features like multiple environments so that you can work faster. Every app is instantly hosted on a global CDN, no configuration needed. We give you simple control over routing and browser caching. We make it easy to roll back to prior releases, or to move releases from staging to production and back again.

Above all, we made it simple to integrate Divshot into your workflow. Love the terminal? Our command-line client is full-featured and ready to go. Hate the terminal? Just upload a .zip file and manage apps from our web dashboard. Gulp or Grunt, Jekyll or Middleman, we aim to make Divshot integrate seamlessly with the tools you love.

The Next Generation

Our existing users may be wondering what is going to happen to the Divshot you already know and use. Rest assured, our visual HTML editor isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's gotten better! With Architect (as it's now called) you can still build visually and edit code. But, starting today, you can publish projects directly to Divshot Hosting with one click. If you prefer to download your code and use it elsewhere, you still can.

The Static Web Company

This launch is a recognition that our vision today is broader than when we began at Startup Weekend almost two years ago. We consider it our mission to advance the art of static web development and educate developers about its power.

To that end, our efforts have already begun. Two weekends ago we hosted the first Static Showdown, a global hackathon that saw more than 300 developers compete to build everything from viral photo sharing apps to sophisticated web analytics packages. We open sourced Superstatic, a simple static file server with support for pushState and more. And we are writing The Field Guide to Static Apps, a free community educational resource about static web apps.

We believe that static web apps are the next frontier for web development, and we are thrilled to be a part of building that future. And so it begins.

Psst, are you passionate about static web apps? We're hiring engineers to help build out our static web hosting infrastructure!