Hi David, if I'm following, we used to have a feature in an early version of Aerobatic called traffic rules that would let you split traffic between different deployed versions of your static site. Does that get at what you're describing?

In this burgeoning static site world, there are a number of hosting providers, including us, that are trying to deliver that sweet spot by providing common features like form handling, auth, custom errors, etc. combined with 3rd party APIs like Disqus for comments, Algolia for search, AddThis for social sharing, and so on.

Thanks everyone for the replies. Quite illuminating to see the breadth of approaches. Was expecting to see a fairly homogenous set of options, but that doesn't appear to be the case, although Digital Ocean looks like the predominant hosting option, with shoutouts for gh-pages, Surge, Divshot / Firebase, Netlify, Heroku, and a number of others.

I wonder for those rolling their own with DO, do you also go to the extent of enabling CDN, SSL, etc. (features that are usually part of a dedicated static hosting service, like Aerobatic, for example)?

Cheers Daniel for the reply. I'm familiar with those services - all good options. I should have added the disclaimer that I'm one of the founders of Aerobatic, a static hosting service. Apologies for any perceived opacity - unintended.

I think your comment about finding someone who's "lazy" is spot on. For example, while you could spend your time crafting your bespoke deployment pipeline from scratch, the "lazy" developer is pragmatic enough to know what their time is worth, and is confident enough in their specialized skills to outsource those things that aren't core to their role in the name of efficiency.