Sooooo..... Web 1.0?
What is the small web? (2020)
51–60 of 126 posts
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#52I generally agree with this article, but ... Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. I feel like people forgot that shared hosting exists (e.g. Dreamhost, or Nearly Free Speech). One computer can serve tons of websites! It can serve multiple Hacker News spikes at once. And the site doesn't even need to be in a virtual machi…
The biggest problem with shared hosting is security. It's common for everyone's processes to run as the same "www-data" user. It can be made secure, but it isn't common and most shared hosting is powered by off-the-shelf piles of shit like cPanel which are Swiss cheese when it comes to security.
No I don't believe any shared hosting does this (at least not ones anybody pays money for). Dreamhost and Nearly Free Speech definitely don't.
This might have been true 20 years ago, but I doubt it was true 10 years ago, and definitely not today. Maybe some tiny universities had janky setups like this.
Fun fact: shared hosting providers maintained OS virtualization for Linux years before Docker existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ -- initial release 2005
I'm not quite sure but it also appears to have pre-dated cgroups. If you pack many users together on a server, you will want something like cgroups to prevent neighbors from DOS-ing each other.
This was a fork and wasn't in mainline Linux.
So they actually had MORE isolation than running as separate Unix users, not LESS.
(edit: I'm not sure exactly which shared hosting providers used such Linux kernel forks, but I'd be interested in anyone with direct knowledge. From using the shell on various shared hosting providers, I know they have pretty custom configurations with more isolation than stock distros.)
This page is a little fuzzy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company)
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#53That art style is really getting out of hand- didn't alphabet corporation just come out with campaign using those?
Corporate Memphis? Everyone is at it. Easy to draw I guess and quickly create loads of illustrations.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest problem with shared hosting is security. It's common for everyone's processes to run as the same "www-data" user. It can be made secure, but it isn't common and most shared hosting is powered by off-the-shelf piles of shit like cPanel which are Swiss cheese when it comes to security.
No I don't believe any shared hosting does this (at least not ones anybody pays money for). Dreamhost and Nearly Free Speech definitely don't. This might have been true 20 years ago, but I doubt it was true 10 years ago, and definitely not today. Maybe some tiny universities had janky setups like this. Fun fact: shared hosting providers maintained OS virtualization for Linux years before Docker existed. https://en.wi…
Nope, most shared hosting is still like the OP comment’s description.
Then of course you have companies like Cloudflare and Netlify where their shared static hosting is not the traditional lamp/cpanel stuff, and certainly have internally developed platforms/serving technologies where security and sandboxing is very likely top of mind.
Companies of Cloudflare and Netlify ilk are the exception, but most cheapo shared hosting (and shared hosting has to be cheap to compete), is still very much multi-tenant with security concerns across the board.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#55No. No no no no no. This is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. While it’s nice to push people to run their own hardware and software, it does nothing to solve the problem of large corporations having large amounts of control and power with little regulation oversight. We like to do this thing in tech where we try to solve all of our problems with engineering and software. What we’re encountering now is no…
But there are technical ways this can be solved. Don't use their services is one.
I've got a lot of problems but you know what problems I don't have? Being censored and tracked by facebook and google. It really is very much an individual problem with individual solutions, though some may not like that fact because individual solutions don't accomplish their goals, it is still a fact.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the drug dealers were certainly there first, etymonline.com has this to say of "user": Of narcotics, from 1935; of computers, from 1967." I am struggling to find a source for who first called users "users" back in 1967 - Actually I see it being used in the 1965 "Multics" papers [0] and the 1964 article in The Atlantic "Computers of Tomorrow" [1], as if it was already a term-of-art. [0] https://multicians.org/his…
OED gives the following usages, the first of which suggest users predate computers: 1950 Science 112 732/1 Analog machines..are enthusiastically supported by their users. 1959 E. M. McCormick Digital Computer Primer x. 139 The number of instructions which can be executed by a computer represents a compromise between the designer's and user's requirements.
Thanks for a good reference! It makes sense that "users of a service" or "user of a machine" slipped its way into computer jargon, no need to be coined or anything.
I'm tempted to pick up a copy of Digital Computer Primer on ebay, I love the old explanations of what these machines even are.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#57No. No no no no no. This is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. While it’s nice to push people to run their own hardware and software, it does nothing to solve the problem of large corporations having large amounts of control and power with little regulation oversight. We like to do this thing in tech where we try to solve all of our problems with engineering and software. What we’re encountering now is no…
Appreciate your take on this. Those of us who wince at spending time in the Social Mess Halls may be inclined to build our personal curios in dusty corners of the net, content with a dozen views a month, but that does not serve as a rebellion to the problems in tech. There must be some better way we can think as groups of people, on necessarily large platforms. Something better than Dorsey and Zuck have managed to build.
I am very concerned about the metaverse trend, it's like people watched the Matrix and thought "yeah, let me plug into the machine and not deal with real life" and didn't catch the moral of Ready Player One, "Real Life is the only thing thats Real", but were sold on the nostalgia orgasm of having Jurrasic Park and Back to the Future in the same game.
I would like to build some anti-meta-verse, that helps you build the actual world by keeping your attention on your own intentions, not allowing your mind to wander at the whim of ad-campaign designers (we can all agree the IOI represented facebook, right? the bad guys that want to fill 80% of your peripheral vision with ads? but if it is more addictive then real life, of course people will choose to spend their time there.)
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#58I generally agree with this article, but ... Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. I feel like people forgot that shared hosting exists (e.g. Dreamhost, or Nearly Free Speech). One computer can serve tons of websites! It can serve multiple Hacker News spikes at once. And the site doesn't even need to be in a virtual machi…
These days shared hosting with multiple tenants is more commonly known as "serverless". A bit of a misnomer since servers are involved, but it's the common term.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#59Small Web: Party like it’s 1999
The author of the article was probably not born then
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#60I generally agree with this article, but ... Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. I feel like people forgot that shared hosting exists (e.g. Dreamhost, or Nearly Free Speech). One computer can serve tons of websites! It can serve multiple Hacker News spikes at once. And the site doesn't even need to be in a virtual machi…
These days shared hosting with multiple tenants is more commonly known as "serverless". A bit of a misnomer since servers are involved, but it's the common term.
From what I understand, the term "serverless" is usually used for "on-demand pricing of computational resources (such as CPU, RAM, and bandwidth)."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing
Shared hosting is usually much more straightforward in many ways, including flat-rate pricing.