In an ideal world, the Issues team would develop and support a plugin ecosystem for the tracker. Users can customize and add the features they see fit and even create their own custom plugins. Allows flexibility and power for those who want it while keeping the core simple and clean
I work at a digital agency (http://carrot.is/, hosted on Netlify), and Netlify has become our go to hosting solution for all our static projects. Their API is killer, but what we've fallen in love with most of all is the webhook support. That means we can use an external CMS like Wordpress or Contentful, load that data into the static site generator of choice (in our case roots: http://roots.cx/), and then send a webhook to Netlify to recompile the site every time content changes.
They've also been super responsive to any issues we've had, even proactively contacting us when a build fails with a solution in hand before we even noticed. Everything gets pushed to a CDN so our sites are as fast as they can possibly be. Happy to answer any questions from a customer POV, highly recommend these guys.
I highly recommend you check out roots (http://roots.cx/), a static site generator that lets you use a CMS like Wordpress to manage content and then pulls data from its API to build a static site.
We've set up a full featured publishing workflow by coupling this with outgoing webhooks on Wordpress using hookpress and a great static hosting platform called Netlify that accepts incoming webhooks to trigger new static builds with roots when content is updated on Wordpress.
So far it's been fantastic for us. We enjoy all the benefits of a static site: low hosting costs, simple infrastructure, highly scalable, and virtually zero downtime, while still giving our users a familiar CMS interface.
We're are using a similar workflow to power our site (http://carrot.is/) but instead of Wordpress we're using Contentful, an API-based CMS with webhook support. Luckily, roots has a very flexible extensions API, so whatever CMS you want to use, as long as it has an API it can be turned into a static site.