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What is the small web? (2020)

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Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#111

Post by anderspitman »

bullen wrote: post #109
mmcgaha wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a little site that I moved behind cloudflare. The dead simple https is nice but I have a page with a gallery of 140 images and it loads so much slower than before the move. Granted I am not paying anything for the service and I don't plan to change it back so this is just an observation.

HTTPS is a waste of electricity.

That's a hot take. Do you never do anything on the web which you don't want your ISP to have full access to?

That said, I agree HTTPS is too complicated to set up, even with ACME/LetsEncrypt. I wish you could just set up your own certificate with the public key in your DNS records. But that requires DNSSEC/DoH or similar.

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#112

Post by anderspitman »

mmcgaha wrote: post #100
bullen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tunneling increases latency. Seen that the final medium/media is a 3D action MMO we don't have time for that latency.

I have a little site that I moved behind cloudflare. The dead simple https is nice but I have a page with a gallery of 140 images and it loads so much slower than before the move. Granted I am not paying anything for the service and I don't plan to change it back so this is just an observation.

How much traffic does the gallery get? Unless you have enough people in a given area hitting the site enough for the Cloudflare PoP in that area to have a warm cache, the first request for each image is going to be slower than going directly to the origin server.

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#113

Post by justsignedupnow »

tamebadger wrote: post #84

Interesting to see no one mentioned https://sandstorm.io/ yet, to really get to the small web, we would not only need each user to "serve their own site" but also buy in to self hosting other services, google docs, trello etc Getting this right at scale is super difficult for many reasons, but the biggest one I can think of is "ease of use" for the general user, and not building things only developers or "tech savvy"…

Great project, glad they kept it online at least, hope someone will move it further on some day.

https://fairapps.net are also hosting an instance, I've used it for HackerCMS scratchpads and stuff, not sure how up to date all the apps are though

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#114

Post by qnsi »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #92

In my opinion "The Small Web" should be "Microsoft Frontpage"ish" paired with one button publishes. Should give the user the option of hosting it with a wide variety of vendors from shared hosting, something like Netlify, and several like GeoCities. or for advanced users self-publish on a computer they have. To make it easy for the common person to post what they want on the web. Involving Javascript, Hugo, an abstra…

hey ThinkBeat, sorry to hijack a comment.

You posted a Ask HN: thread [0] Ask HN: Are there any web/text scrapers that work with Facebook Groups?

did u found something working? Or did you drop your search. I am interested in scraping private FB groups

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095801

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#115

Post by mmcgaha »

anderspitman wrote: post #112
mmcgaha wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a little site that I moved behind cloudflare. The dead simple https is nice but I have a page with a gallery of 140 images and it loads so much slower than before the move. Granted I am not paying anything for the service and I don't plan to change it back so this is just an observation.

How much traffic does the gallery get? Unless you have enough people in a given area hitting the site enough for the Cloudflare PoP in that area to have a warm cache, the first request for each image is going to be slower than going directly to the origin server.

It is a site for a game that died ten years ago so it gets more bots than people at this point. Last month my cloudflare email said they saved me 22.7% of 91.69MB.

So you are correct that the cache is never warm.

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#116

Post by betwixthewires »

brightstep wrote: post #94
betwixthewires wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please explain to me the path from individuals hosting their own Small Web apps to the mitigation of Amazon's power and prevalence in our lives. It's nice that you are off fb, I am too. But some number of individuals deciding not to use the platform does nothing when it is the way most people access the internet. People don't like this example because of its stereotypical user base, but remember what happened to parl…

If I don't use amazon, they have no power over me. They're background noise, like sally beauty salon. And consequently, the less people that use them the less power they have. It's easy to forget that their power isn't immutable, we give it to them.

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#117

Post by chubot »

boramalper wrote: post #63
chubot wrote: post #37

I 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…

Containerization solves 99% of those problems and more, such as not having to worry about conflicting dependencies, share of common resources, etc. I would say shared hosting is now more popular than ever, with a twist : similar to the shift that has happened from multi-user mainframes to personal computers to ubiquitous computing (ie individuals having multiple computers), self-hosters are also now hosting not one b…

The original post is talking about static sites: https://sitejs.org/

And mentions a VPS:

Sync and deploy to your own VPS.

I shouldn't have brought up LAMP / PHP, because that confuses the issue.

The point is that you should not use a VPS to serve static content! You will not do as good a job as maintaining the OS and web server as a professional. Just use shared hosting!

You can also use Github Pages or whatnot, but that goes against the philosophy of centralized cloud providers.

Commodity shared hosting is very portable between providers, because it's just a Linux box, without "cloud" stuff. That's all you need for static pages. Use rsync or git.

This page looks really ugly but it will give you a sense of how many independent providers there are: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=4

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#118

Post by chubot »

zozbot234 wrote: post #58
chubot wrote: post #37

I 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.

Differences between shared hosting and "serverless":

- Monthly or yearly billing vs hourly (as the sibling mentioned). I think my plan is $9/month or something, plus $16/year for domain name.

- Single server vs. multiple servers. AWS Lambda is great if you actually need to scale up, but you don't need that for serving a website. A single machine can serve hundreds of static websites.

- You can get commodity shared hosting from dozens of providers, but you can get serverless from only a few "big cloud" providers, which goes against the ethos of the small web. That's because writing and maintaining the custom software to scale up is a big undertaking.

The original post is talking about static websites. You don't need anything running on the server for this! So all you need is shared hosting, and you won't even use the PHP part.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29804920

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#119

Post by chubot »

amoe_ wrote: post #79
Nextgrid wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

Years ago I worked at a small hosting company and avoiding this situation was definitely on our minds. There are a lot of approaches to it under eg. Apache: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/HTTPD/PrivilegeS... My bet would be that most larger shared hosts have implemented some type of solution for this, but perhaps some smaller ones haven't.

Yeah so I use Python and FastCGI with Dreamhost, which runs as a separate process and separate user.

I think mod_php (Apache shared library) is the the thing where every PHP site runs as www-data, but I thought that FastCGI was preferred these days over mod_apache. FastCGI is a separate process, which can run as a separate user, communicating over sockets.

But the original post is about STATIC websites, so this won't come into play. The main point is that you shouldn't spin up a VPS to serve static sites! You'll be burdened with maintaining the OS and web server.

Shared hosting is basically as easy as Github pages, with more choice of provider (in keeping with the philosophy of the small web).

Re: What is the small web? (2020)

#120

Post by chubot »

indigodaddy wrote: post #54
chubot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

See this comment, it's probably only mod_php, which you don't need for serving static sites:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29804968

I've used 3 shared hosting providers, all of which provide SSH access. And when I ssh in, and type "ps", I see my own processes, not the processes of anybody else. They are running as a different user.

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