| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago |
| Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront. |
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| ▲ | temp0826 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I did it this way for a long time, but it was mostly a learning/experimenting/fun thing back to have a "proper" server out there that I can run whatever service I wanted on (be it an irc bouncer or whatever). I'm a grownup now and don't have the time/care anymore and just run them out of s3/cloudflare (which was still "fun", but now I don't need to worry about the cve of the day. I don't mind contributing to the centralization of the internet when I'm paying $0/month for pages that nobody visits. Definitely happy to nerd out again if something ever warrants it). |
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| ▲ | shric 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don’t do it myself, but “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” is a bold claim. It might be harder, but we (geeks) love to do things ourselves. If someone is willing to use something like Hugo instead of garbage sites like Medium why not use a VPS? For many people working in tech $10/month and free are the same thing. |
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| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Personally I get my geek satisfaction from building systems that are rock-solid and require zero maintenance. Not choking on rare opportunities to go viral should they arise is a nice bonus too. | | |
| ▲ | shric 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Per a comment I made to one of your other replies in this thread, VPS doesn’t exclude this. You can put it behind cloudflare for free. And yes you can have preferences to keep things simple while others can make something unnecessarily complex. For personal projects this is fine and part of learning. If you had said “I much prefer… because…” it would have been fine but you said “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” which ignores people’s subjective preference for over engineering hobby stuff for learning. |
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| ▲ | toast0 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I pay $35/month for a dedicated server for my nothing webpages. One the one hand, I could really host at home for $0/month extra. Or on a VPS for $5/month. I do need my own thing because I run a network testing tool that needs some amount of direct access. On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my situation. At least I'm sensible and don't have an actual colo space to visit. In the unlikely event I go viral, I'm pretty sure my server can manage serving https at 1gbps, and that's plenty. Maybe TLS is too much though, the cpus are too old for AESNI. |
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| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Good on ya. Personally I'm happier with my extra ~$6k, sparing of however many hours of pointless maintenance work over the years, and 100% uptime over past/present/future even if I go into a coma. | | |
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| ▲ | vsgherzi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| some people (myself included) like hosting their own stack for fun or for learning. There's additional concern with tying your work to something like github it makes it more of a pain to pull it off and put it somewhere else. I'm not really sure what you mean by objectively inferior. It's trade offs like everything in this field. As far as harder, I don't really think the lift for a personal VPS is that high. Again it's a fun hobby project for most. It's fun to run your own stack. If you want to opt into the github cloudflare goodness that's fine they're good services but I wouldn't say it's better or degnegrate others for not doing that. |
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| ▲ | jvanderbot 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done. |
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| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets. | | |
| ▲ | sgc 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | OMG, not the once in a lifetime viral opportunity! You will never win this crusade, because there are too many people here who know from experience a VPS is neither expensive, nor under-performing up to millions of users a day, nor hard. | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's fine, it's not really a crusade. Just my opinion about the right infrastructure for the right use case informed by the objective reasons I gave. If doing more work with more headaches for a solution that costs more and performs worse is your jam, then power to you. |
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| ▲ | qmr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a broken take for so many reasons. Also service monitoring is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I listed my reasons, feel free to provide your own. I've done enough security, ops, and oncall professionally that I have zero desire to do extra in my free time. Power to you if want to do otherwise and/or post references to "deskilling" while advocating an outdated inefficient approach to long-solved problems. |
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| ▲ | shric 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets. You can put it behind cloudflare for free. | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can put the whole thing on CloudFlare Pages for free too. Zero reason to pay for or deal with the complexity of an unnecessary VPS. | | |
| ▲ | shric 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Again “zero reason”. For some people it’s fun to have a VPS, that is a reason in and of itself. | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Of course literally anything can be 'reasonable' if you a priori like doing it independent of its technical/functional merits. My ex-coworker liked to write literally tens of thousands of lines of extra, completely unnecessary code for fun. That was a fine reason for him personally but didn't make it any less stupid to deal with for the rest of us. |
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| ▲ | vsgherzi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a blog.... you don't need some monster machine. You can server TONS of people off the smallest Digital Ocean instance. Many of these small VPSs can be had for less than a couple bucks a month. Tons of popular influencers run their own machines for their blog. insinuating that it's unsafe to run your own machine is insanity. I don't understand this mindset of being scared to run your own stuff. Especially if you're doing doing it at such a large scale there's nothing wrong with doing it with nginx and a linux box on a vps. You'll learn a hell of a lot more and be fine. At the end of the day it's a computer. We've been hosting websites since the 70's. With the advant of cloud compute is easier than every to run your own. (edited to be less mean) | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | We have had something vastly better than an individual computer since idk, the mid 90s, called a CDN. I guess if you want to call being informed about the online threat landscape "scared", that's your perogative. For me, it's common sense to avoid completely unnecessary threat vectors to my digital infrastructure, but power to you if you like dealing with extra maintenance overhead and constantly wondering whether you're providing free cryptomining to some random international criminal. | | |
| ▲ | vsgherzi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's threats on the internet, so don't spin up servers? Idk am I reading into that unfairly? That seems pretty fear mongering to me. Lots of engineering goes into making things safe for engineers to build on. Of course you can also just use squarespace and not worry about it at all. Perhaps my security posture is just not as intense as yours but I'm really just not super concerned my blog is going to get pwned. If it does then I get to learn some interesting things. I'm also not sure that I really need a CDN for a simple blog . I'm not going to benefit from the caching as it's not video or images. | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Servers are work, including security overhead, so yes, don't spin them up if there is an alternative solution that is superior in every way except for not being able to churn digital butter. | | |
| ▲ | vsgherzi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yknow unfortunately I just don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this one. I really don't mind that small amount work and I enjoy owning and operating the entire stack. That dosen't really seem like your cup of tea. The flexibility and learning is more important for me. For example I want to aggregate HN comments and lobste.rs comments and inject that into the HTML before serving. (on the server side so no CORS or other additions) I was considering adding additional metrics to see who is hitting the server and how at the reverse proxy level. This is all stuff I can't really do on a github pages blog. I see what you're saying if you want set and forget that's fine, but like I said above it's a tradeoff. The one server I have just has 80 and 443 open with nginx. I expect it to run indefinitely with little maintenance. | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean, obviously we're not gonna see eye-to-eye if you're talking about a non-static, non-hugo site, which was the subject of my comment. I've owned and operated enough stacks e2e both personally and professionally to have gotten over the novelty. The less shit that can go wrong, the better. I sleep better at night not wondering whether any of the constant stream of IPs in my fail2ban log is wielding a yet-to-be-CVE'd zero-day, or finding out that my site has been down for 6 weeks because of some fucking stupid bug in the latest kernel patch or whatever. |
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| ▲ | dizhn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Another option is cloudflare pages. Can be coupled with any hub or you can just push html artifacts. |
