Statik: The Demo Needs To Be Online In Thirty Seconds

Posted: 2026 | Category: Hosting

The client meeting is in twenty minutes. The prototype works. It is sitting in a dist/ folder on your laptop, and your laptop is going to be closed in a bag on a train.

So you start looking for somewhere to put it. Netlify wants an account, which means a signup, which means picking which email, which means a verification link. Or you ask a colleague to add it to the server, and they will, tomorrow, once they have finished the thing they are actually doing.

Twenty minutes later you present it from localhost with your screen shared, and afterwards you email a zip file that nobody opens.

The build was ready. The hosting was the problem.

Small Sites Are Not Small Enough To Be Easy

Every organisation ends up needing somewhere to put things that are almost nothing. A one-page prototype. A generated report. A client demo that needs to live for three weeks. A slide deck exported to HTML.

None of it justifies a deployment pipeline. All of it needs a URL.

So the options become bad in predictable ways:

  • A third-party account means your unfinished client work is on someone else’s platform, under someone’s personal login, and nobody knows whose
  • A ticket to whoever runs the servers means a wait measured in days for something that takes minutes
  • Attaching a zip means the recipient never looks at it
  • Doing nothing means the demo does not get shown

And when a demo does go up somewhere, it stays there forever, because nobody remembers what is deployed or who owns it.

A hot-desk at the end of the afternoon: a laptop being folded shut mid-build, a coat over the chair back and a bag already packed on the floor The work is done. The only thing missing is somewhere to leave it where other people can see it.

How We Glued It Shut

Statik is static site hosting on infrastructure you already control. You upload, you get a link, you are done.

Three ways in, all of them equally valid:

Upload a zip. A build output from any framework. Statik unpacks it, checks for an index.html at the root, and serves it.

Drag a folder. Straight from Finder or the file manager, no archiving step.

Paste a single HTML file. For the page that is one page and does not need a build system to prove it.

Every upload becomes an immutable deployment. The old one does not disappear, it just stops being the active one. Rolling back to yesterday’s version is one click, because yesterday’s version is still there, byte for byte.

Sites live at stk.glue.blue under your workspace, or at a short global slug when you want the link to be short enough to read out loud.

What Is Actually In It

Immutable Deployments and One-Click Rollback

  • Every upload is stored separately with a full manifest of its files
  • The live version is a pointer, so switching is instant and safe
  • The deployment history is a list you can read, so you know what is live and when it went up

Password Protection Per Site

  • Turn it on per site, not per workspace
  • Visitors get a styled unlock page and then an HttpOnly cookie
  • Change the password and every existing cookie stops working immediately

Custom Domains

  • Serve a site at the root of your own hostname, subdomain or apex
  • The settings card shows you exactly which DNS record to create
  • A site on its own domain drops the no-index header, because at that point it is a real site and it is yours to publish

An API and Personal Keys

  • Personal API keys drive a versioned REST API
  • Deploy from CI, from a script, from anywhere that can send a file
  • A Claude Code skill deploys straight from a coding session: build, one command, live URL printed

Workspaces

  • Sites belong to workspaces, so the demos for one client stay together
  • Members, roles, and workspace-scoped keys for automation
  • One place to see everything you have online, which is the thing that eventually matters most

Projects: Editing Without Git

  • A site can be linked to a repository, and Statik hands an editor only the source files it is allowed to touch
  • Configuration and build files are never shipped out, so they cannot be changed by accident
  • Named preview revisions let someone review a change before it becomes the live version
index.html at rootliverollback, one clickstill there, byte for byteZipFolderSingle HTML fileUploadValidateDeployment, todayDeployment, yesterdayDeployment, last weekVisitor
Each upload is kept whole. Going live, and going back, is a matter of moving one pointer.

The Security Part We Do Not Compromise On

Hosted sites run arbitrary JavaScript. That is the whole point of hosting them.

So the management app and the hosted sites live on two different hostnames, on purpose, permanently. The admin interface is on statik.glue.blue. The sites are on stk.glue.blue. A hosted demo cannot reach the admin session because browsers will not let it across an origin boundary. Unlock cookies are HttpOnly, so a hosted page cannot read those either.

This is a structural decision rather than a setting. It is written down as the one thing never to break.

A shortcut here would turn a demo host into a credential thief.

Hosted sites do share an origin with each other, which is fine for internal demos and not fine for untrusted third parties. We say so plainly rather than implying more isolation than exists.

A small office server cupboard with a half-height rack, tidy cable runs and a strip of masking tape labelled in marker pen Hosting on hardware you already own, with the awkward parts kept deliberately far apart.

Who This Unsticks

Agencies and Studios

You produce demos constantly and each one needs a link within the hour. Statik gives you a link within the minute, on your own infrastructure, with the client’s unfinished work not sitting on a personal Netlify account.

Developers Who Just Built Something

The build finished. You want somebody to look at it. One command from the terminal you are already in, and the URL is in your clipboard.

Anyone Who Has To Password-Protect A Preview

Client work that is not public yet, a report with numbers in it, a design review. Per-site password, styled unlock page, no configuration.

Teams Tired Of Not Knowing What Is Deployed

Every site in one list, every deployment dated, every rollback one click. The question “is that old demo still online?” gets an answer instead of a shrug.

Get Started

Still emailing zip files? Still presenting from localhost? Still discovering demos from last year that are somehow still online?

Get a link.

Visit statik.glue.blue, drop in a folder, and read the URL out loud before the meeting starts.

Statik is built by glue.blue - we stick solutions to problems. Permanently.

Ready to put it online in thirty seconds? → Get Started → Contact Us

Posted in: Hosting, Static Sites, Developer Tools, Infrastructure