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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#71

Post by stronglikedan »

xwdv wrote: post #7

No point in owning your own platform unless you are in the business of building and running a platform. The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario. What’s your contingency plan?

> What’s your contingency plan?

So you could rephrase(?) it as, "always own your platform"! Where "own" means to take ownership of one's choices and have a contingency plan, so one is not in the extremely embarrassing position of trying to blame one's bad business decisions on one's provider's business decisions (valid or not).

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#72

Post by cortesoft »

coding123 wrote: post #13
xwdv wrote: post #7

No point in owning your own platform unless you are in the business of building and running a platform. The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario. What’s your contingency plan?

Why give the platform all that seo. In the long past era we used to have a bunch of random webshops. Now sellers can barely survive unless they are on Etsy eBay or Amazon. We gave them all that free SEO and now we are wishing we didn't.

As a consumer, though, it sure is a lot nicer to not have so many random webshops.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#73

Post by nkozyra »

gambler wrote: post #60
soulofmischief wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites out of any other major aggregator community.

>HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites ...on AWS.

> ...on AWS.

OK, but it's trivial to move hosts, it's much harder to move from a content platform.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#74

Post by dublin »

okaleniuk wrote: post #21

I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ is just a static script-maintainable stand alone site. It has no 3rd-party platform but the web hosting. Moreover, I own the domain and don't really rely on anything provider-specific. I can migrate it any day and users wouldn't notice a thing. I also use GitHub to host sources https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons but it's just a convenience not a necessity. The wh…

Well, you can hand-craft HTML is you want, but there is a huge variety of tools out there designed to give you full control of building and managing blogs and other websites (list sites courtesy of the Netlify folks): https://www.staticgen.com/ https://headlesscms.org/

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#75

Post by megous »

okaleniuk wrote: post #21

I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ is just a static script-maintainable stand alone site. It has no 3rd-party platform but the web hosting. Moreover, I own the domain and don't really rely on anything provider-specific. I can migrate it any day and users wouldn't notice a thing. I also use GitHub to host sources https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons but it's just a convenience not a necessity. The wh…

100000 monthly is nothing. That's like 2 visits per minute.

Any random vps should handle 10-100s of visits per second (mostly limited by size of your pages and bandwidth if you use static content).

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#76

Post by saurik »

majewsky wrote: post #68
libria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

> ability to handle HN hug-of-death Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period. Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand scheme of things.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#77

Post by robbrit »

okaleniuk wrote: post #21

I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ is just a static script-maintainable stand alone site. It has no 3rd-party platform but the web hosting. Moreover, I own the domain and don't really rely on anything provider-specific. I can migrate it any day and users wouldn't notice a thing. I also use GitHub to host sources https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons but it's just a convenience not a necessity. The wh…

How do you host it? Do you own the machine, or use a cloud VM?

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#78

Post by weberc2 »

majewsky wrote: post #68
libria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

> ability to handle HN hug-of-death Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period. Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

I would expect open connections to be the bottleneck (not CPU or mem). Do you just have very low latency and thus relatively few concurrent open connections (yes, I saw the graphs in your link, but it's hard to figure out how many concurrent connections are open at a time)?

EDIT: Downvoters, would really like to know why you're downvoting? Am I being naive in thinking a blog would be bottlenecked on connections?

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#79

Post by Gravityloss »

majewsky wrote: post #68
libria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

> ability to handle HN hug-of-death Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period. Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

Worthy of a submission of its own.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#80

Post by dublin »

tombert wrote: post #64
gambler wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites ...on AWS.

The statement probably holds true of people who self-host in their home as well. I currently run a cluster in my basement.

As long as your Internet connection has decent upstream speed and latency, this is still a good option. A Raspberry Pi, for cryin' out loud, is roughly equivalent to a Cray 1/X-MP, so the need for huge "server iron" to serve even fairly large sites is a thing of the past except for shared server providers who want thousands of sites per server. If your site is static and you're running off a RAM disk or SSD, then you're as fast as pretty much anything you can buy. That said, S3 or Netlify are really easy and bring CDN and redundancy to the party, and neither can really lock you in if your content generation and DNS is under your control.
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