pCloud public folder, same way as the old dropbox public folder.
Copy paste the file in a directory, the whole directory is visible (index) as a page on the web. At this point you can just grab the link to the file and share it
Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#12Not sure when you thought it was easier? 20 years ago you would definitely be using FTP. Get a cheap web host, FTP onto it. Job done. If you manage the domain separately that's pretty much the same job as always too.
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#13Serve from S3 bucket.
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#14>sync a txt
how much do you care about the provenance of the file? I would just slap it into pastebin and call it a day. If that isn't what you mean, any commodity cpanel reseller will probably do. If you want even more control, Caddy is drop dead simple.
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#15just connect your computer to the internet without firewall and no patches applied. will be online almost immediately ;-)
Will also be offline in about the same timeframe, too (-:
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#16Tell hackers something is unhackable - they do all the work for you too ;-)
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#17If you mean a website, outside of managed platforms a PHP file synced with ftp on any provider will have a quick feedback look. Not that I recommend it, but to start, it is one of the quickest.If ftp or scp is too complex I recommend to use a managed website builder (wix, hosted wordpress)
If you literally mean a txt made public: gdrive, Dropbox, notion, s3,…
Maybe ngrok fits the bill, to literally share a folder on the internet.
I am not sure why you are in such a rush. I would argue today it is easier than ever to „put something“ on the internet. I do not think it can be simpler that the options above. Either learn (a minimum amount) or be in somebody‘s platform. IMHO none is too bad, just different tradeoffs. Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#18That's the tradeoff between using a platform and doing things manually. The underlying architecture that things rely on generally can't be changed to be drastically simpler to use due to network effects. You can't make breaking changes to TCP/IP for example or the modern world would implode (or realistically, that new branch would be ignored). So you rely on platforms to hide this complexity. Digital Ocean probably h…
Agreed. The question is if you need the complexity these platforms have. Do you need a distributed platform with regional load balancing and all sorts of other stuff to share a small text file with a handful of people? Absolutely not.
It ultimately depends on the usecase. Small web hosts still exist, you can also still stand up a personal fileserver at home in many cases and host a file to a few people. Heck you can even email some files or host it as a torrent.
If you need millions of people to see it and want it to be nearly guaranteed to survive with 99.99999... SLAs then yes, you probably do need all that platform complexity.
Some of these platforms make it relatively easy. S3 isn't too bad to get up to speed with for a quick sort of file hosting strategy.
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#19>Everything's locked into a platform
The quick ways are generally locked into a platform. But if it's a text file, does that matter? If you don't want the lock in, there's some initial setup, but after that it can be drag/drop.
There's also some middle ground, like serving from a local NAS box. Still locked-in, but more under your control.
Re: Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?
#20Depends where you draw the line on "platform". There's still the old-school cPanel shared hosting types out there where you can drag and drop through a file manager. But then you usually have to pay a gatekeeper to get one, and that could be considered a platform?
Highly not recommended, but get a static IP address and open a port on your home network to the internet that points to a folder you drag to would be the most open?