Create a demo website

[jtojnar]

Since Heroku dropped the free tier, we no longer have a functioning demo site.

It would be nice to create one but we need a web host. Also the content should be periodically cleared.

Maybe it would be sufficient to just showcase the web ui with a pseudo-backend returning static files.

Also requested in #1293

[desbest]

As someone who used to run a web host around 2004-2014,that offered both free and paid web hosting, I wouldn't trust free hosting because the free hosting market is saturated as too many people are doing it. While this might sound good to have excessive competition, under the precariously unstable economics of ingeniously making a profit from giving something away for free, the industry cap for free hosting is much smaller than it is for paid hosting. To give an analogy, if I sell you a burger for £2 that cost me £1 to produce, it is much easier for me to generate the £2 from one paying customer, than to get £2 from a subsidised range of 30 financiers spread across 5 revenue streams.

In short, it became very hard to attract signups for free hosting from free customers, which then made it hard to monetise, as there was hardly anyone signing up to be able to subsidise the free hosting, at zero cost to the consumer. Most of the free hosting companies have shut down around 2008-2012. It became like selling fizzy drinks at a school canteen rather than a sports stadium. Would you continually pay a monthly subscription to give something away for free, when as the months are passing, nobody is signing up as they're going somewhere else?

Also as it's saturated, you could get even more paid customers than you could free customers (zero plus one), with less time and zero money, as when you're offering something for free, you're very restricted in where you can advertise, as most people don't trust free web hosts.

I suggest you use Conifer. It lets you archive (or cache) web pages within your web browser, so you can visit them again later even if the web page disappears. In your use case, it also allows you to have interactive walkthroughs where each web page accessed is listed within the same web browsing session, so people can rewind your steps and re-take them.

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