php is great and this is not news. all the haters go to your hipster frameworks and spend the time i need to build an app with just setting up your boilerplates.
I've only been doing it for 25 years rather than the full 30 but in my noob opinion I'll take Docker and Github over it every time. The number of times a site failed to update because an FTP file failed to transfer completely, or that the permissions were wrong, or that the FTP client changed a file's CRLFs, or that a directory on the server wasn't writable by the FTP user, or... well, let's just admit that FTP sucked and things are far more reliable now.
To be honest, GitHub sites have been amazing for me. I just have a simple static website with personal information. HTML and CSS with minimal JS. Purchasing a shared webhost still means extra cost on top of domain registration. With GitHub, I just followed their instructions with my domain, and everything just worked. I'm also not paying anything per month or year besides domain registration which is really nice when you have to start budgeting tightly.
I don't know about docker and all of that, though.
It’s been awesome for me too. I’ve had a static site hosted on github since high school. It’s been a cheap way to host a website for free (I use github + cloudflare) since before I had a credit card. I’m willing to bet it helped me get at least one of my internships.
It’s been a great way for me to learn, as I’ve re-written the site every 2 years or so.
With GitLab Pages it's even easier, just fork one of the examples in gitlab.com/pages, push a content update in a commit and it's online a minute later thanks to GitLab-CI and GitLab Pages.
This workflow seems almost exactly the same as GitHub Pages, I'm not sure it's worth my time to switch platforms and go through the hassle when everything works now.
Yeah but...but... that would just get the job done. Nothing to write about, nothing to whine about, no weird dependencies being pulled, nothing to hand-wave, nothing to yell and humblebrag about. No theatre.
If there's a blog post: "I got my Ford F-350 to use less fuel by using this One Weird Trick", it's not much use to say how a Honda Civic is a much more simple and efficient solution to the given problem; the domain has already been defined to be the complicated solution.
I'd probably choose the sftp and webhost route myself, but you know.
