In the past when Ive used a backend server for these small side projects at some point some external API goes down or a key expires or I forget about the backend and stop paying for whatever VPS it was on. Then when I revisit it years later, Im annoyed that its gone and curse myself for relying on an external service - or on myself caring over a longer period of time.

Hosting a static website is much easier than a “real” server - theres many free and reliable options (like GitHub, GitLab Pages, Netlify, etc), and it scales to basically infinity without any effort.

So I wrote a tool to be able to use a real SQL database in a statically hosted website!

Heres a demo using the World Development Indicators dataset - a dataset with 6 tables and over 8 million rows (670 MiByte total).

Source: Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages - (or any static file hoster) - phiresky’s blog

It’s kind of ridiculous that this seems to work well.