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Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

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Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#121

Post by davchana »

gtirloni wrote: post #38
jaden wrote: post #6

GitHub pages [0] gives you static sites with HTTPS and a custom domain without nearly as much complexity as this if you're looking for an alternative to Netlify. [0] https://pages.github.com/

I feel like Netlify has set the standard in this area now so I'm curious to learn what's different when I see these projects mentioned here.

I have always and only used Gitlab Pages, except one test site at Netifly, that too from a Gitlab Repo. Gitlab Pages are super easy, static, need one .yml file, one cname and txt dns record.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#122

Post by clintonb »

ehonda wrote: post #105
clintonb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance is my primary concern. I deal with software for a living. I want my blog to just work without me having to worry about maintaining the VM. Netlify makes this dead simple. I used to host Wordpress sites for myself and family members. I've now moved nearly all of those sites to Netlify (for hosting) and Forestry (for editing/CMS). I no longer have to worry about malicious hacking attempts, Wordpress updates…

apt-get install nginx goaccess cd website cp * /var/www/html Yearly maintenance required: apt-get update, apt-get upgrade View traffic stats: goaccess -f /var/log/nginx/access.log I'd say its just as easy and seamless to do it yourself on a cheap VPS for a static website. HTTPS isn't that much extra work either.

That's great that you have enough time and experience to consider all of this easy. As someone who works a bit higher up the stack, I rarely go as deep as configuring Nginx. This setup may take you a few minutes, but I usually end up spending an entire Saturday on stuff like this. Having done this for a few years, I would rather spend my free time on other things.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#123

Post by mises »

ehonda wrote: post #105
clintonb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance is my primary concern. I deal with software for a living. I want my blog to just work without me having to worry about maintaining the VM. Netlify makes this dead simple. I used to host Wordpress sites for myself and family members. I've now moved nearly all of those sites to Netlify (for hosting) and Forestry (for editing/CMS). I no longer have to worry about malicious hacking attempts, Wordpress updates…

apt-get install nginx goaccess cd website cp * /var/www/html Yearly maintenance required: apt-get update, apt-get upgrade View traffic stats: goaccess -f /var/log/nginx/access.log I'd say its just as easy and seamless to do it yourself on a cheap VPS for a static website. HTTPS isn't that much extra work either.

Maybe I'm just a security nut, but I would probably also relegate ssh to a non-default port, allow key-only authentication, narrow ciphers, close all other ports (except 80, 443, and 53). Also fail2ban, sysctl tweaks (networking, disable coredumps), and a whole bunch of other things I have in a script.

I've seen way too many people get their boxes trashed to leave an internet-accessible one exposed and unsecured.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#124

Post by mises »

WhiteOwlLion wrote: post #62
NateEag wrote: post #47

Am I the only one who still hosts my own static sites on a plain old virtual machine? It's pretty simple to configure nginx for static sites, and by doing it yourself you reduce vendor lockin to just about nil. Even if S3 is massively cheaper, $5/month for a tiny VM seems like a small price to pay for being vendor-abstract. I suppose S3 is way less likely to suffer a meaningful outage than my little VM, but how many…

There are some low end VPS providers too that go as low as $1/mo. I usually stick to $2/mo or higher just for stability, reliability. Even you even got hosts like Hetzner Cloud, Scaleway (see European hosts) that provide great service, bandwidth, and VPS. I don't know why people use Amazon... I don't find their value proposition very good unless you need dynamic scaling for unpredictable demand.

That last unless is what the value prop is. Personal site is indeed just fine on a cheap vps (and I can also put up the occasional file), but AWS has better reliability and much better scaling. When you consider the opportunity cost of time, AWS can come out cheaper.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#125

Post by mises »

tyre wrote: post #59
danpalmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN won't take a static website on a $5 VM down if it's set up even remotely correctly. Traffic to a popular link on HN is likely to get on the order of ~100rps max (more likely 1-10rps). Nginx will handle that with no problem. CDNs may make a site a bit faster, but for a static site it's unlikely to make much difference if you're on a good host in US/EU or central Asia. If you're hosting in Australia or Japan, maybe…

Completely agree. I think many people here regularly work on larger web applications in dynamic languages with heavy JS front-ends piling on dependencies. Nginx is unbelievably fast by itself, not to mention the optimizations that are completely unnecessary for a static blog. It's not going to be your blocker. If you're serving up 20MB of JS and inlined images on each page load, yeah, you may want to rethink that. Bu…

Out of curiosity, what made you decide to purchase a ".xxx" domain for your blog? And do you regularly get comments?

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#126

Post by gcb0 »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #70

We use a combination of Netlify + Webflow + Hugo for our website (www.facetdev.com). With that we get a global CDN and our website will never go down. Netlify has been awesome and it made it stupid easy to combine our www site on Webflow with a hugo static blog in a subfolder (/blog). This might be my favorite web publishing workflow ever. If you haven't tried Netlify yet, definitely give it a look.

looking at webflow, i have flashbacks (not sure if the good kind) of macromedia fireworks in the 2000's.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#127

Post by r3bl »

davchana wrote: post #121
gtirloni wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Netlify has set the standard in this area now so I'm curious to learn what's different when I see these projects mentioned here.

I have always and only used Gitlab Pages, except one test site at Netifly, that too from a Gitlab Repo. Gitlab Pages are super easy, static, need one .yml file, one cname and txt dns record.

GitLab introduced their Pages relatively recently, maybe three years ago. The other two (Netlify and GitHub pages) are a few years older. I also vaguely remember something about it first being available in GitLab's enterprise edition, and later on being ported to the community version.

Not saying that there's anything wrong with it in particular, but it arrived a bit too late to set the standard for anything. People compared it to Netlify even when it was first announced.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#128

Post by seriocomic »

clintonb wrote: post #75
NateEag wrote: post #47

Am I the only one who still hosts my own static sites on a plain old virtual machine? It's pretty simple to configure nginx for static sites, and by doing it yourself you reduce vendor lockin to just about nil. Even if S3 is massively cheaper, $5/month for a tiny VM seems like a small price to pay for being vendor-abstract. I suppose S3 is way less likely to suffer a meaningful outage than my little VM, but how many…

Maintenance is my primary concern. I deal with software for a living. I want my blog to just work without me having to worry about maintaining the VM. Netlify makes this dead simple. I used to host Wordpress sites for myself and family members. I've now moved nearly all of those sites to Netlify (for hosting) and Forestry (for editing/CMS). I no longer have to worry about malicious hacking attempts, Wordpress updates…

Your story is almost identical to mine - years of hosting on a VPS a bunch of small family/project mostly-Wordpress sites. I simply exported them and uploaded to Netlify+Github. I haven't really bothered keeping the connection from the back-end to a dynamic export but have kept those pieces in place for another wet weekend.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#129

Post by bradknowles »

jobigoud wrote: post #108
masukomi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

frontended doesn't make sense as a word. Fronted has many somewhat applicable definitions including * provide (something) with a front or facing of a particular type or material. * act as a front or cover for someone or something acting illegally or wishing to conceal something. "he fronted for them in illegal property deals" * stand face to face with; confront.

As a non native speaker I came to the conclusion that in English it is possible to turn any noun into a verb. Not parent but "Frontended" made sense to me.

I'm a native English speaker. Have been for over 50 years. Frontended sounded perfectly natural to me.

Re: Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

#130

Post by adam1210 »

jkarneges wrote: post #33
jaden wrote: post #6

GitHub pages [0] gives you static sites with HTTPS and a custom domain without nearly as much complexity as this if you're looking for an alternative to Netlify. [0] https://pages.github.com/

It even gives you a CDN. GitHub Pages is fronted by Fastly.

I tried using github pages with fastly, however it appears when a new site deployment is done, github does not invalidate the fastly cache, in addition to fastly independently caching resources on the site, which can cause broken site deployments for several minutes where it is using mixed cached resources from old and new deployments. I opened a ticket with github support, and they said it was expected behavior. It makes it partially unusable for me.
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