Announcing Teahouse Hosting!
We're done being coy, it's time to talk about what the Teahouse is.
We're website hosting that aims to meet you wherever you are on your web tech journey. This article will use a lot of jargon because our initial launch is aimed at users who have a solid background in web technologies. Any jargon we use for those users will include links to primers on the topic. If this reaches you and this article feels overwhelming, don't worry: we're focused on reducing how much you need to know to get a website online.
Our Philosophy
We believe that static websites are the bedrock of the modern web. They are extremely efficient to serve, they work well with modern caching strategies, and keep working as local internet service degrades. Static websites are also extremely accessible to create. While no programming is trivial, getting someone to a usable knowledge of HTML is the task of a day.
We believe the web platform is fundamentally good. Both technologically and socially. Semantic HTML is a powerful tool that provides accessibility by default. Modern CSS continues to provide more powerful features every year. When used judiciously, Javascript can empower things that are otherwise impossible. The web platform's true power, though, is connection: people having a place to express themselves, and see and connect with others.
As we expand the platform, our goal is providing a solid foundation for everyone. Things like sample websites with strong fundamentals baked in. Editable stylesheets that make it easy to get started. Tooling suggestions that will simplify the journey.
We also want to support modern user experience sensibilities. For experienced developers, that means version control friendliness, your choice of tool and platforms. We're even providing a content delivery network (CDN) as a default.
We want owning and controlling your own web presence to be accessible again.
Where We Are
The product pitch is simple: Own your web presence. Get the benefits of a CDN with no additional code or configuration. Deploy from your favorite CI/CD system (currently we can support Cirrus CI and Github Actions, but more on the way). We do not limit how many websites you can host, nor the number of uploads. We have a limit of 10GB of storage across all your websites.
Where We're Going
In the short term, we want to be able to support more CI pipelines! We'll also be addressing a lot of the tech debt we created in our initial system.
In the midterm we'll support other upload methods than CI. We'll need to build that pile of resources and quick starts to help get less experienced developers up and running. We also intend to include a self-service ejection system that will let you get the last version of your website from us as an archive.
Long term, we're developing a static site generator that we'll be able to provide a web front end for. The goal is to provide an experience similar to a content management system that anyone who can fill out forms on the web will feel comfortable using. Get the benefits of all that static site goodness we're building, without needing to learn a version control system. We're also planning DNS management and integration, so it's easier to point your domain at our system.
Who We Are
We're a queer and trans owned business run by two developers with over 30 years of experience. One of us is a product developer who spends a lot of her time on technical education of all kinds. She wrote PursuedPyBear and also runs Steal This Website where she revels in a kind of web brutalism as art and education resource. The other is a DevOps witch who is the other part of the PPB team and a xonsh xore emeritus that has a habit of disappearing for a day and coming back with a brand-new open source library that often performs some deep magic in Python.