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How to make a very inexpensive, dynamic website

Some of my customers in my freelance jobs require me to create for them a an easy-to-maintain website with some dynamic content. Normally I would help them set up a CMS like Joomla or Drupal, but some of the customers have a cheap, shared, web hosted accounts which do not run those CMS at optimal speed.

For those customers, I usually implement the following to give them a website running at fast speed:

  • Most of their website is statically generated by a custom offline CMS that I created. The offline CMS is an easy to use rails app that runs on my computer and uses webgen to generate clean HTML and then uploads the generated HTML to the shared account. That way is easy for me or for my customers to make changes to the website.
  • For storing data from the visitors and other small dynamic services, I use the free Google App Engine. By using Google App Engine, my customers have access to Google's vast resources without paying a penny. Furthermore, I know for sure that those customers will not exceed Google Apps' quota anytime soon.
  • For the look-and-feel of the website, I use open source templates if the customer does not have a specific template in mind.

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