Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online?

Hey HN,

I have this frustration with the modern web. Everything's locked into a platform or requires a build step or CI.

It got me thinking the other day: what's the easiest way to sync a TXT file onto the web?

I thought about FTP, scp, Dropbox, GitHub — but all of them require multiple manual steps and feel complex.

It got my wondering: why isn't it easier today to put something on the internet than it was 10 years ago?

A 2€/month VPS, Apache, Let's Encrypt certificate, done. Use rsync or sshfs, or edit the file right on the VPS.

It is not much easier and cheaper nowadays than 10 years ago because is has always been quite easy - with the main change that a cert for https is free nowadays.

That'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 has a one-click droplet for a static server you could use.

Heroku?

just connect your computer to the internet without firewall and no patches applied. will be online almost immediately ;-)