To use static mode you run fastn build command, and this command creates a folder named .build in the fastn package root folder (which is the folder that contains FASTN.ftd file). This folder contains HTML, CSS, JS, and image files. This folder can be deployed on any static web server.

Static mode is a great idea for a lot of content heavy, and infrequently changing sites.

A lot of static hosting providers provide free hosting for static content. Static host means no dynamic computation, and so it is quite cheap to host.

You can checkout our guide on Github Pages and Vercel, two of the popular options available to you. Both offer free plans.

If you are using static hosting, lesser software is running on the server, and therefore it is harder to hack. Wordpress is a common alternative to build content heavy websites, and Wordpress is often hacked by bad players.

Since static sites are rendered HTML, so the server can directly serve the HTML files, making it much faster to serve.

Static mode is great, but sometimes you want dynamic features. Maybe you want to have authentication on your site. Or maybe you want to collect information from the visitors or show them up to date information.

To deploy your fastn website in dynamic mode you have to deploy the fastn binary itself. fastn can run on Linux, Windows and Mac so you have a lot of choices for where to deploy it.