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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#91

Post by noxToken »

weberc2 wrote: post #78
majewsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Or low total bandwidth. A personal blog not expecting a lot of traffic may only have puddle of transfer bandwidth per month. Depending on the content of the post, that can max out a cap rather quickly.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#92

Post by jandrese »

saurik wrote: post #76
majewsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The instant your website requires a database query to build the front page you're susceptible to the HN hug of death. Obviously you can build a scalable solution to handle traffic spikes, but there will always be the danger.

If you're talking about an ordinary webserver giving out an ordinary webpage you will run out of bandwidth long before you overload the server.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#93

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

maehwasu wrote: post #44
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.

Everyone (or at least most people here) knows that Google has all those advantages. The issue is that we keep falling back on those advantages, rather than doing the work necessary to make owning your own platform realistic. I also laughed at the irony of OP's site going down, but these are the growing pains that will ultimately be necessary if we don't want the internet to be walled gardens run by 3-4 companies.

As a comment upthread mentioned, there’s no fundamental technical obstacle. Free software and commodity hardware are plenty sufficient to match any specific technical challenge at the HN front page scale.

But running a web platform is a hard operational problem. Having all the pieces available doesn’t get you even halfway there; you have to spin them up and glue them together, and any number of relatively minor mistakes can mean the whole thing falls over. I’m not sure even in principle that can be reduced to a portable platform binary.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#94

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

ElFitz wrote: post #47
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They solve it poorly. That's why HN allows up to three resubmissions for interesting material that fails to make the front page. A lot of well-deserving stuff still doesn't get lucky, and never makes the front page.

What does / would solve it well? Edit: also, for hackernews, why should it be about reaching the front page? There is only so much space there, and not reaching it does not mean not reaching anyone.

Reaching the front page: Thousands of readers.

Not reaching the front page: Maybe two or three readers.

If we're talking about solving discoverability, we cannot pretend that reaching one or two people is always going to yield the same success as reaching thousands.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#95

Post by zaarn »

kazinator wrote: post #88
zaarn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN "Hug-o-Death" can be handled by a potato unless your product is layers of bad code. No reasonable app should just die from 20MBps of traffic.

Have you considered: what if it's connected to a 10 MBps pipe? (E.g. crappy residential DSL.)

Then the connection dies but if you get through (and any decent router should in that case just half bandwidth per connection) you get a working site, not a 404 or 500 or similar.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#96

Post by PeterisP »

llao wrote: post #90
majewsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

A blog typically comes with a comment function. That's something dynamic which requires lookup in some sort of database. Your page is purely static and does not even have pagination between posts. Hosting that is trivial and nothing to boast about. Your comparison is really unfair and needlessly nasty.

A comment function doesn't necessarily require a database lookup for every request, you can cache the blog page for a second or two so that it doesn't collapse when getting a hundred requests per second.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#98

Post by tombert »

dublin wrote: post #80
tombert wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep yep, I run a cluster of 5 ODroix XU4's (not radically different than a Raspberry Pi), and even doing a ton of video streaming through Emby (which I hate), everything tends to perform just find for the up-to-three concurrent users that are ever on it.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#99

Post by jdauriemma »

jawns wrote: post #27

From the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20190324154559/http://alwaysowny... > You know, it wasn't that long ago. There was RSS. There were blogs. There were sub-groups and communities. The weirdos found each other. The non-weirdos found each other. It wasn't perfect. But it was distributed. It was ours. > It was yours. > Now? The original dream of the web is dying. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and…

"Always own your platform" doesn't necessarily mean "never use someone else's platform."

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#100

Post by ben509 »

Silhouette wrote: post #66
Grue3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original comic implies that abstaining from owning an iPhone is equivalent to not participating in society. Basically if your principles are so weak that you can't abstain from owning a luxury phone brand, which should take a literal bare minimum effort, then you don't really have these principles. A Twitter account is not a requirement to participate in society either. You don't even have to build your own Twitt…

As a long-time holdout when it came to smartphones, and a big believer in things like personal privacy and having control of your own devices, I can't agree with that argument any more. Smartphones are ubiquitous, to the point where everyday public services do assume that almost everyone has one and there are significant or even prohibitive barriers for those who do not. Sadly, the best you can hope to do now is to t…

It seems like Purism has a pretty decent user-benevolent smartphone in the works. If most services are available via website, it may be clunky but it'd work.

And many public services are offering APIs, so I can imagine their app store getting a pretty decent range of clients before long.

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