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Magit manuals are available online again

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Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#11

>I immediately burned down my account with that hosting provider1, because they did not allow setting a spending limit. Is this true? He mentions the provider being AWS, surely some sort of threshold can be set?

There are two widely understood downsides of AWS:

1. High egress costs

2. No hard spending limits

Both of these were problems for the author. I don't mean to "blame the victim" but the choice of AWS here had a predictable outcome. Static documentation is the easiest content to host and AWS is the most expensive way to host it.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#12
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uggghhhh! AI crawling is fast becoming a headache for self-hosted content. Is using a CDN the "lowest effort" solution? Or is there something better/simpler?

Nah, just add a rate limiter (which any public website should have anyways). Alternatively, add some honeypot URLs to robots.txt, then setup fail2ban to ban any IP accessing those URLs and you'll get rid of 99% of the crawling in half a day.

If only it were that easy.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#13

I don't know exactly what the website was, but if it's just HTML, CSS, some JS and some images, why would you ever host that on a "pay per visit/bandwidth" platform like AWS? Not only is AWS traffic extra expensive compared to pretty much any alternative, paying for bandwidth in that manner never made much sense to me. Even shared hosting like we did early 00s would have been a better solution for hosting a typical w…

AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs, at least for sites that are not very high traffic.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#14

I don't know exactly what the website was, but if it's just HTML, CSS, some JS and some images, why would you ever host that on a "pay per visit/bandwidth" platform like AWS? Not only is AWS traffic extra expensive compared to pretty much any alternative, paying for bandwidth in that manner never made much sense to me. Even shared hosting like we did early 00s would have been a better solution for hosting a typical w…

AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs, at least for sites that are not very high traffic. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

> AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs

Sure, but it's unlikely you actually have to place a CDN in front of your manual, it's mostly text with few images. People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, just add a rate limiter (which any public website should have anyways). Alternatively, add some honeypot URLs to robots.txt, then setup fail2ban to ban any IP accessing those URLs and you'll get rid of 99% of the crawling in half a day.

If only it were that easy.

And for many people, "easy" is hardly the word to describe that.

No wonder small businesses just put their information on Facebook instead of trying to manage a website.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#18
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uggghhhh! AI crawling is fast becoming a headache for self-hosted content. Is using a CDN the "lowest effort" solution? Or is there something better/simpler?

Nah, just add a rate limiter (which any public website should have anyways). Alternatively, add some honeypot URLs to robots.txt, then setup fail2ban to ban any IP accessing those URLs and you'll get rid of 99% of the crawling in half a day.

I gave up after blocking 143,000 unique IPs hitting my personal Forgejo server one day. Rate limiting would have done literally nothing against the traffic patterns I saw.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs, at least for sites that are not very high traffic. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

> AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs Sure, but it's unlikely you actually have to place a CDN in front of your manual, it's mostly text with few images. People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.

The whole point of CDNs is to host static assets, why wouldn't you use one? They are dead simple to use.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs Sure, but it's unlikely you actually have to place a CDN in front of your manual, it's mostly text with few images. People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.

The whole point of CDNs is to host static assets, why wouldn't you use one? They are dead simple to use.

Far more expensive than just having a dumb server somewhere at some normal host.

People simply do not understand how expen$ive AWS is, and how little value it actually has for most people.

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