: How can I make sure my website will be available during a presentation? I have an online presentation to do next week and I have it all ready to go. The website is HTML and CSS only (no

@Vandalay111

And, last but not least, make screenprints of all the webpages you were planning to display. Hey, it's worked for me. Put them in Power Point or just organized by name/sequence.
Murphy's Law has no boundaries!

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@Yeniel560

I think you can write them onto a notepad document, save as foo.html or something along those lines, and open, it won't rely upon the internet (admittedly I'm not sure how to fit the CSS in there I've never made to much html, or any CSS so you can try not sure how it will turn out).

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@Si4351233

So many overly-complicated answers.


The website is HTML and CSS only (no DB), and currently resides on my shared hosting account.


You do not need Apache
You do not need XAMP (or similar)
You do not need cloudflare, dropbox or any other 3rd-party service. (github? for a presentation? please.)

All you need is a portable storage device. USB key, external drive, whatever.

What you DO need is to confirm that your presentation contains only relative links. Here's how you do it:


copy the folder from your shared hosting account to your computer.
disable networking. Turn off your wifi, unplug your ethernet cable etc. Or just pick up your laptop and go somewhere where there is no wifi, like the stairway or parking lot.
open the folder, double-click on the first index.html file and see if it looks correct.


If everything is fine, you are good to go. If not, add a comment for further instructions.

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@Bryan171

To make sure your website is available, you can use round-robin DNS. You can order two hosting packages with two different IP's and use round-robin DNS for load balancing. If one IP is offline, the traffic will be redirected to the other.

The other way is with CloudFlare. You can use CloudFlare + round-robin DNS for extra reliability. CloudFlare is a free (they have paid plans too) service which adds security and analytics to your website. You can also use their CDN. It will really optimize your website. But the best part is that if your site goes down, they can show a cached version. All you have to do is change your nameservers. You can find more information about that on their website.

There's one more thing:


Now, although my shared hosting is (relatively) reliable, I have
noticed that recently they have been making some changes and my
website has been unavailable at times.


If your host doesn't use a failover server or something, it's probably better to search for another host - your website should always be available if it's possible.

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@Merenda212

Normally, you do not need any server just to view raw HTML files, even if they reference other files, CSS and JavaScript. Simply double click on any file and it will open with the default browser of your machine from the local file system.

However you may need to check if your static content has no absolute references to other files or other resources (<a href='http://mysite.com/extra.html'>) and only contains relative references (<a href='extra.html'>). It is a good practice anyway.

Best would be to copy in advance the content into hard drive of the laptop will be using, and test the presentation. Bring also the same content in USB stick or CD disk, in case you would suddenly need to use another machine.

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@Heady270

You could host the static content using Amazon S3. See docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html for a guide as to how.

Basically you sign up for an AWS account, upload your website into S3, and can then access it via a url like <bucket-name>.s3-website-<AWS-region>.amazonaws.com. You can also create a custom domain for the bucket with a CNAME, which would then allow you to access it via presentation.mydomain.com.

You should be covered by the S3 free tier, 5GB and up to 20000 requests a month for a year. Source: aws.amazon.com/free/ chadthompson.me/2013/05/static-web-hosting-with-amazon-s3/ offers a good walkthrough of the process with screenshots.

If you don't need the domain to be internet accessible for the presentation, then using a USB drive with a copy of the website on it is by far the simplest way, as per Prinsig's answer.

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@Gonzalez347

If you are using Git for version control of your site... (not to judge... but you kinda should be if it's an important project!)

You can host your entire website on Github's "project pages". (aka Github Pages)

It's really simple to just git push your site code there.
Basically you push to a branch called gh-pages and your site will automatically publish, and update when you push!

So if your project's Github repo page is github.com/imausername/mysupersite Then the public Github page for your project would be at iamusername.github.io/mysupersite

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@Candy875

You can simply open the internet page locally and display it in your browser.

If you even want to show a different domain name, you can use XAMPP to open a local webserver. Host your website there and point the domain to your localhost on your maschine by appending the following line to your hosts file on your system:

127.0.0.1 presentation.mydomain.com

Here you can find out where the hosts file is located on your OS.

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@Rivera981

If the website is HTML and CSS only, You don't need a host. Just throw it on the USB stick that that you're going to use for the redundant WAMP environment and run it from whatever machine you plug it in to.

If you're worried about losing the USB stick, the web host would be a suitable backup.

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@Hamaas447

Since your site is static, one solution is to use CloudFlare, because it can still serve cached pages if your site goes down (with proper configuration). It will be transparent if there is an issue.

And keep a copy of your site on your laptop or on a memory stick if you can't use your laptop. If all goes wrong, you will still able to finish your presentation using localhost rather than your domain name. It would be the last resort solution.

P.S.: Of course, to implement a portable website, one should implement relative paths everywhere, that is with a leading '' meaning 'relative from the root'. Don't forget it, otherwise the link will be relative to the current directoy.

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