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I don't need a VPS anymore

greenash.net.au

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Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#141

Post by liotier »

Jensson wrote: post #137
dijit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a common (new) myth that sysadmins didn’t code. There were some IT technicians who couldn’t code and some operations staff who couldn’t code (and would proudly claim this, for some reason). But tools like ansible, salt, chef and terraform were written by sysadmins. In fact a lot of non-feature code in my companies such as database fencing programs and automated blue/green rollouts has been written by sysadmins.…

Some sysadmins could code. Not all sysadmins can code.

Sysadmin long enough and you'll find yourself inadvertently scripting in Bash. A few languages and API later and you'll realize that you may be coding. That is how it went for me...

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#142

Post by jaza »

exodust wrote: post #111
jaza wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. A big part of why I'm saying "I don't need a VPS anymore", is because I'm also saying "I don't need dynamic sites anymore". I've been building dynamic sites for two decades (once upon a time "original LAMP stack" PHP + MySQL, more recently Python + PostgreSQL). I honestly never imagined that static sites could one day compete with that. But times have changed, and the JAMstack of 2022 has all the functio…

> " I've managed to convert all my old dynamic sites to be statically generated, without really compromising on bells and whistles. " In your linked article you say: "Anyway, site search is only a nice-to-have...and folks can just use Google with the site: operator instead" To me that sounds like a compromise. I'm out of my depth talking about SSG-powered sites because I've never developed them. My area is frontend d…

Author here.

Re: search. It's not that site search is impossible, or even particularly hard, with a JAMstack site. It's just that I didn't consider it MVP for my personal site. I know how it can be done, and I'll implement it when I have time.

Re: CMS. I know where you're coming from, I spent a good decade or so specialising in traditional CMSes / frameworks myself, mainly Drupal and Django. There are various answers to the CMS question for static sites - the ones that I'm most familiar with are https://forestry.io/ and https://tina.io/ (and I've heard no end of buzz about https://www.sanity.io/>). Those solutions are solid, I wouldn't call them "bizarre suggestions and workarounds". And they're good enough for most needs, IMHO. But I haven't tried pitching them to clients yet.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#144

Post by jaza »

iansinnott wrote: post #118

So the solution here was mostly (entirely?) Netlify? Netlify is great (happy user here), but I was hoping to see the author's "suite" of solutions. Surprised not to see CockroachDB, Supabase, Firebase, NextAuth and the like. You can get pretty far these days on a free plan even if you need auth and a real database.

Author here. For all my personal and small-client sites that previously had auth and a database, and that I previously hosted on my VPS, I realised that, no, none of them really do need auth or a database. An SSG (Hugo or Eleventy) and a simple host (mainly Netlify) will do the job.

If I need auth and a real database, I'd probably still go with a more traditional architecture (Python + PostgreSQL is my go-to). Hosted either on a VPS, if I want to keep it cheap and simple, or on ECS / RDS (or non-AWS equivalent), if I want more scalability and resilience (and have the budget for it). But thanks for your suggestion, I'll mull over it.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#145

Post by nextlevelwizard »

cutler wrote: post #21

Fine if you can make do with static sites but that's hardly a common use case. Most of us who use a VPS are hosting Nginx with a reverse proxy to Rails, Django, Express or Laravel + PostgreSQL or MySQL where the memory costs are a fraction of the equivalent cloud offering. I tried Github pages once, rather than Netlify, and pulled my hair out trying to get HTTPS working with a personal domain. Last I checked it's sti…

>Fine if you can make do with static sites but that's hardly a common use case.

This feels odd to me. Unless you are building a web site that is a product, why do you need anything besides a static site? I am going to go as far as to claim that: most websites should be static sites.

>I tried Github pages once, rather than Netlify, and pulled my hair out trying to get HTTPS working with a personal domain. Last I checked it's still not possible.

Don't know when you checked last, but this is false and has been for years. My personal page/blog/demo has been running in Github pages for past 5 years and I've had custom domain the whole time. I can't remember if HTTPS was from the beginning, but it sure is there now.

If memory serves me correctly all you need to do is to point your domain to githubs name server and add a file called `CNAME` with your custom domain to your repo to get it working.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#147

Post by anothernewdude »

pan69 wrote: post #79
trey-jones wrote: post #57

I might need some perspective. Every time I read one of these I'm just shaking my head, and yes the arguments are Less Power, Less Control, but also SysAdmin is me. That is my identity, and the part of the job that I like the most. I solve problems with configuration before code. So I hate to think that I'm becoming obsolete, of course. I also don't think that I am, because I do think that my way has some clear and d…

You're not obsolete. It's just that some people just want to drive their car and get it serviced somewhere every once in a while rather than doing it themselves. Same for servers.

No, some people want to rent from a fleet of cars, so that even if it needs servicing it can be replaced in less than a second.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#148

Post by jrapdx3 »

stefandesu wrote: post #136
jrapdx3 wrote: post #89

For most things we want to do there's more than one way to do it. Ultimately it comes down to having freedom to try different things, to experiment with web technologies as my interests evolve. I really really dislike having to bend to unnecessary restrictions. I don't think I'm alone in that regard. A VPS is a great way to go. IMO managing a VPS is hardly burdensome, the amount of effort it requires is minuscule. Ce…

Are you using Jitsi via Docker? I was self-hosting a Jitsi instance for a while for my friends, but among all the services I'm hosting, it required the most work and broke all the time. At some point I gave up and we're now using either Signal or, if Signal can't do what we need, some public Jitsi instance that we trust.

I'm self-hosting jitsi in a "regular" VPS (4GB/4cpu). Though Docker is a popular and supported option. In the years I've been using jitsi it's improved immensely. The current stable version is quite usable, works fine when participants have good internet connections. I mostly use it with 2-5 people. Once installed and configured very little attention has been required.

I'd agree that for larger meetings the public server at https://meet.jit.si is a better option. AFAIK it's trustworthy, but of course my own instance provides greater assurance of privacy. Anyway I'm confident that's true, though I couldn't give a 100.000% guarantee...

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#149

Post by dmitriid »

trey-jones wrote: post #57

I might need some perspective. Every time I read one of these I'm just shaking my head, and yes the arguments are Less Power, Less Control, but also SysAdmin is me. That is my identity, and the part of the job that I like the most. I solve problems with configuration before code. So I hate to think that I'm becoming obsolete, of course. I also don't think that I am, because I do think that my way has some clear and d…

> there is still room for my ilk in the tech world.

Yes, there is. AWS/GCP/Azure are incredibly complex beasts, and people who know how to properly set them up (anything from proper user management and rights to correct ingress points and resource allocation) are as rare as 100-carat diamonds. It's a different kind of SysAdmin job, but it is that.

Don't believe people who are saying "you can just hire junior admins or infra-knowledgable programmers" are talking out of their asses (or until a kubernetes cluster upgrade or a lapsed IAM role brings the company down for 24 hours).

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#150

Post by dmitriid »

jaza wrote: post #62
cutler wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overplaying the "static" card. If you're using the JAMstack the static bit is only half of the equation. Need a contact form? Now you need a form-processing service and it's no longer static. If you're replacing old PHP + MySQL sites you'll need a lot more than a static site generator. "Mostly static" might be more accurate but then how long does that last? Clients typically want WordPress plus a ton o…

It's up to you when you think a traditional server back-end is still warranted, there are certainly still cases where it makes sense. But if all you need is a contact form, then I'd argue that it doesn't make sense! Yes, I agree, Netlify Forms is a rip-off, if you need more than the free limit of 100 submissions per month (which personally I don't, but of course many people do). But there are many other options for s…

> It's up to you when you think a traditional server back-end is still warranted

All the cases outside of "oh, I dump my thoughts on the page once a year".

Even for a blog in the modern world I would like:

- automatic crossposting to Twitter and Facebook

- automatic retrieval and reformatting of external content (because, for example, twitter embeds are very cumbersome, heavy and slow)

- automatic retrieval of video and images from external sites (youtube, instagram, twitter etc.) because of link rot

- delayed publishing

- search

- and a plethora of other things

Yes, you can stitch togethe a bunch of "serverless" stuff for this, but you've just "replaced" the "traditional server backend" with a bunch of traditional server backends.

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