Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Static site hosting hurdles

notes.volution.ro

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 183 posts

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#21

Post by nathants »

yawnxyz wrote: post #19
nathants wrote: post #9

don’t forget to add cloudflare workers + r2. the best parts of lambda and s3, without the egress billing.

I've never even worked with lambda and s3, and CF workers and R2 took like 20 minutes for me to learn and set up. I don't know how they made it so incredibly easy to learn and get going compared to AWS, but every time I try to figure out how to do AWS I get confused and get put off.

aws has too many knobs, presumably to satisfy the union of the needs of all the enterprise customers. that said, lambda+s3+dynamodb+ec2 are pretty good once you tape over all the knobs that aren't needed. i work with them like this[1].

these days i build on aws and r2. aws for the nuts and bolts, r2 for high bandwidth egress. it's a perfect match.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#22

Post by joelberman »

Last month I paid $1 for route53, 12 cents for S3. and am hosting my https site which I create with publii. Works fine. Took a little time to set up, but now it is just a button push to update the site. Great for my personal blog and phtot gallery.

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#23

Post by chubot »

Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009.

I think the industry (or part of a generation of programmers) somehow collectively forgot that it exists. I don't see any mention of it in the article -- it solves the problem exactly. It easily serves and survives all the spikes from Hacker News that my site gets.

Shared hosting is a Linux box with a web server that someone ELSE manages. You get an SSH login, and you can use git and rsync.

It's associated with PHP hosting, but it is perfect for static sites.

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#app...

Answer to the HN question: What's the fastest way to get a page on the web?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254006

FWIW I also have a Linux VPS with nginx and a HTTPS certificate, but it's a pain. I much prefer using shared hosting for things I want to be reliable.

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#24

Post by dragontamer »

I'm very confused by this entire post.

No mention of neocities or shared/managed hosts (Namecheap or even GoDaddy?)

I mean, I know we nerds look down upon GoDaddy and other such sites, but it's cheaper than setting up a VPS and good enough for any static site.

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#25

Post by alberth »

chubot wrote: post #23

Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009. I think the industry (or part of a generation of programmers) somehow collectively forgot that it exists. I don't see any mention of it in the article -- it solves the problem exactly. It easily serves and survives all the spikes from Hacker News that my site gets. Shared host…

Dreamhost is hugely underrated.

Their custom panel with deep integrations are phenomenal for side projects or small businesses. In under a minute you can have your web server, SSL cert, database and more all setup and working - and you don’t have to manage any of it.

I wish more companies offered their level of managed services.

(If anyone knows of others, I’d like to hear who)

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#26

Post by decasia »

I guess everyone has their own solution to this. Here's mine:

- Write some static html and one stylesheet

- Pay DigitalOcean for the cheap plan

- Run nginx + letsencrypt

- Apply linux security updates promptly

- Occasionally pay to renew the domain

So yeah, that does take a little bit of (very simple) systems administration skills, and it's a recurring commitment. But there is no such thing as a successful but unmaintained web site. Even if you don't have to maintain the infrastructure, you have to maintain the content. So I don't mind the occasional maintenance tasks. They keep me in touch with linux systems administration in a good way.

It's cool to write your own web server software, I guess. But serving static html is pretty much a solved problem. I felt like the OP was inventing problems with it that don't really exist in practice.

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#27

Post by mymythisisthis »

I'd be nice to run a self-hosted site from a home server. Currently paying a third party for a static site, but space is so limited. Storage space isn't that expensive, until you have to pay monthly for it. Mostly just want to host my own pictures.

Would really like a hands on workshop to learn to do it (how to get a static IP, setup everything correctly, how to use https).

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#28

Post by bitexploder »

decasia wrote: post #26

I guess everyone has their own solution to this. Here's mine: - Write some static html and one stylesheet - Pay DigitalOcean for the cheap plan - Run nginx + letsencrypt - Apply linux security updates promptly - Occasionally pay to renew the domain So yeah, that does take a little bit of (very simple) systems administration skills, and it's a recurring commitment. But there is no such thing as a successful but unmain…

Let the updates run automatically. Put certbot on a cron. Ride it until ubuntu LTS I am on dies. So easy. :)

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#29

Post by dragontamer »

alberth wrote: post #25
chubot wrote: post #23

Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009. I think the industry (or part of a generation of programmers) somehow collectively forgot that it exists. I don't see any mention of it in the article -- it solves the problem exactly. It easily serves and survives all the spikes from Hacker News that my site gets. Shared host…

Dreamhost is hugely underrated. Their custom panel with deep integrations are phenomenal for side projects or small businesses. In under a minute you can have your web server, SSL cert, database and more all setup and working - and you don’t have to manage any of it. I wish more companies offered their level of managed services. (If anyone knows of others, I’d like to hear who)

Is there anything really wrong with a CPanel host with FTP upload?

Namecheap, Dreamhost, GoDaddy even (well maybe not them lol). There are a billion shared hosts everywhere and CPanel really isn't hard to use for HTTPS enabling or getting FTP locations to work with.

------

Bonus points: shove a random .php file in there and it probably will work if you need just a little bit of dynamic content.

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#30

Post by esperent »

I switched from Vercel static site hosting, because I recently read an article here about how it's usually more economical to scale vertically instead of horizontally (i.e. use one big server for everything).

Even though I'm only running a few services, I did the math and realized it's absolutely true. I can fit everything I'm running onto one DigitalOcean droplet behind Cloudflare for $24/month + an extra 25gb block storage for $2.5/month + $5/month for backblaze backups.

Everything being: a bunch of static sites, Keycloak Auth, Rocket.Chat, Odoo business management software, Nginx Proxy Manager, Outline (self hosted Notion), Docker, Portainer, Cockpit, Listmonk.

Static sites are free actually, besides storage. You can just add a location directive pointing to the folder in Nginx Proxy Manager and it'll serve the files for you.

The biggest memory hog is Keycloak which is a Java app so it uses 700mb of ram.

But in any case I have set up an entire small business software suite with a hosting cost of $31.5 and I can host unlimited static sites with no additional cost.

Post reply on HN