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Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

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Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#61

Post by vsgherzi »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #51
vsgherzi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a blog.... you don't need some monster machine. You can server TONS of people off the smallest Digital Ocean instance. Many of these small VPSs can be had for less than a couple bucks a month. Tons of popular influencers run their own machines for their blog. insinuating that it's unsafe to run your own machine is insanity. I don't understand this mindset of being scared to run your own stuff. Especially if y…

We have had something vastly better than an individual computer since idk, the mid 90s, called a CDN. I guess if you want to call being informed about the online threat landscape "scared", that's your perogative. For me, it's common sense to avoid completely unnecessary threat vectors to my digital infrastructure, but power to you if you like dealing with extra maintenance overhead and constantly wondering whether yo…

There's threats on the internet, so don't spin up servers? Idk am I reading into that unfairly? That seems pretty fear mongering to me. Lots of engineering goes into making things safe for engineers to build on. Of course you can also just use squarespace and not worry about it at all. Perhaps my security posture is just not as intense as yours but I'm really just not super concerned my blog is going to get pwned. If it does then I get to learn some interesting things.

I'm also not sure that I really need a CDN for a simple blog . I'm not going to benefit from the caching as it's not video or images.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#62

Post by arjie »

The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade…

Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#63

Post by WJW »

andix wrote: post #48
tannhaeuser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian LTS/extended LTS

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude.

Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just admit you don't care about it enough anymore to do even that. In the last case just delete the project.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#64

Post by ezst »

andix wrote: post #4

Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?

For a while (a decade+), I was running CentOS on my servers on the same assumption of long time stability and ensuing peace of mind. Then I figured that over such durations, the ecosystem drift becomes significant and keeping applications up to date and running on top of the OS becomes an increasing challenge (with the more "infrastructure" packages like glibc, python/Apache combos, GCC, ... slowly becoming incompatible with the latest applicative stack).

Then I figured that version upgrades were miserable, not just because I had painted myself in a weird corner with ungodly packages mix-ups, but because the upgrade path was always best-effort. I think I gave up during the 6 to 7 transition, as I realised that all I needed was fedora: with yearly or half-yearly updates I have no need to fight the distro's packages: stuff stays current and in working order, major distro upgrades go smoothly, downtime is minimal. I'm not considering going back to any "server distribution" ever.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#65

Post by qmr »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #30
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.

You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.

This is a broken take for so many reasons. Also service monitoring is a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#66

Post by andix »

WJW wrote: post #63
andix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just…

Yes, I'm lazy. And that's fine.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#67

Post by [deleted] »

arjie wrote: post #62

The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

[deleted]

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#68

Post by temp0826 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #25

Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront.

I did it this way for a long time, but it was mostly a learning/experimenting/fun thing back to have a "proper" server out there that I can run whatever service I wanted on (be it an irc bouncer or whatever). I'm a grownup now and don't have the time/care anymore and just run them out of s3/cloudflare (which was still "fun", but now I don't need to worry about the cve of the day. I don't mind contributing to the centralization of the internet when I'm paying $0/month for pages that nobody visits. Definitely happy to nerd out again if something ever warrants it).

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#69

Post by cocoto »

WJW wrote: post #63
andix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just…

It can be way more than 2 hours depending on the project.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#70

Post by interroboink »

andix wrote: post #48
tannhaeuser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian LTS/extended LTS

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

I feel there is a balance to be struck between a project that is popular (where if you run into problems, you will get good support), and one that technically gives longer-term support (but if things go wrong, that support might not be very good).

I haven't used a lot of different distros, but for me, Debian has been a good balance of those factors. You may need to do more upgrades per decade, but the ones that you do are more liable to go smoothly.

Just my 2¢ on the topic (:

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