We set up temporary hosting for this, to enable good user feedback sessions to go ahead. But it is definitely temporary hosting, and while there are many other tasks still to get right before a public launch we should discuss the plan for permanent hosting.
I've been looking into this and trying some code ....
So the suggestion is to use Travis to build the static site and then to push that static site to a simple web server, in a manner similar to what we do for the standard.
The Travis build will run in a separate repository ( https://github.com/open-contracting/extension-explorer-build ??? ), and will run once a day on a cron job.
You can see an experimental set of scripts at https://github.com/odscjames/test-extensions-explorer-site These do everything except upload to a web server (that would be set up for master branch only).
You can see a build for these at https://travis-ci.org/odscjames/test-extensions-explorer-site/builds/428595924 - it lists all the files it has built.
Why Travis?
Easy to set up, all the user access for actions like "rebuild" are already done, state and errors of process are public for all to see.
Why not the https://github.com/open-contracting/extension-explorer repo?
Because we wanted to keep builds for this repository deterministic, so that if a developer is working on a new branch and starts to get errors they know the error is something they have done and not another change outside the repository that is hard or impossible to track down.
It would be very difficult or maybe impossible to cleanly add deploy stuff to this repo without that coming in (as the deploy stuff would need the data from extensions-data-collector and then you lose the deterministic aspect).
So it may be possible, but it would start to make the Travis process quite complicated. The only benefit of putting the deploy in here is that you would automatically get the website redeploying everytime you merged to master instead of up to 24 hours later, but as we don't anticipate that many urgent changes we don't think that's important - and if there are any important changes it's possible to go to Travis and push "rebuild" on the last build to get a deploy anyway.
Which server?
Just an Apache Linux Open Data Services one, similar to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenDataServices/opendataservices-deploy/master/open-contracting-standard-deploy.sh - I haven't looked into the details of this yet but don't anticipate any issues here.
Posting for comments and feedback .....