DigitalOcean publishes a service called their ‘App Platform’ which removes some infrastructure burden from running an application. The idea is that you point it towards a repository, it identifies what is required to run, and sets up (and bills you) accordingly.

One of the built-ins was static site hosting. With three free sites, that’s a decent deal, considering you get free TLS and their caching CDN. I use Jekyll, and was having issues with 404’s being served when clicking on certain hyperlinks.

To remediate, I had to change instances where .html files were being referenced directly to instead be a folder and an index.html inside that folder. This cleared up the issues linking to different sections of the website.

Example

Problematic Configuration:

site-root/
index.html
contact.md   <-- Unable to link to contact.md from index.html
projects.html <-- Unable to link to projects.html from index.html
posts/
├─ sample-category/
│  ├─ sample-post.md

Solution:

site-root/
index.html
posts/
├─ sample-category/
│  ├─ sample-post.md
contact/
├─ index.md <-- renamed from contact.html
projects/
├─ index.html <-- renamed from projects.html

This is also demonstrated on my GitHub