Run Your Own Website • Hacker News Board

Re: Run Your Own Website

#41

Post by derefr » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

ibudiallo wrote: post #39

For my personal websites, I only ever tried wordpress around 10 years ago before I built my own from scratch. https://idiallo.com What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are: 1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...) 2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...) 3. Expensive hosting ($40/m+) The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple conten…

I use the “clever hacks” because I’m afraid of one of my blog articles getting linked to on Reddit. Even if there are no ads on my site, I want it to stay up and readable, and I don’t want to suddenly get an egress-bandwidth bill in the process!

Also, despite having done ops for years, I don’t want my continued willingness to do ops (as with DO/Linode/Vultr) or my continued usage of my small municipal ISP (or even my small municipal ISP’s continued existence, as these often get bought up, and their branding—including web-host domains!—gets blown away in the process) to determine whether my site stays up. I want my website to continue to exist, at the same URL, even if I retire and go live in the mountains with no Internet for the rest of my life. I want my works to outlive me!

There are “good” shared HTML hosts that have been around for decades and will likely be around for decades more—SDF.org is one; most universities with accounts for alumni are another—but these don’t tend to be able to handle the bandwidth, so you have to combine them with a service like Cloudflare anyway.

But really, “slug-based static-site build-product hosting” like Github Pages and Netlify are just shared HTML hosts as well—with some extra features, sure, but ones that you can ignore if you please. With GH Pages, for example, you don’t have to use a static-site generator if you don’t want to; you can just commit content assets directly to your github-pages branch. And the result has the same properties you list: if Github complains, I can take that same repo and push it to another site; or it can gracefully degrade to being a folder (that happens to have a .git dir in it) that I can plop into any public_html directory.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#42

Post by cannonedhamster » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

Invictus0 wrote: post #27

This type of post makes it to the front page pretty frequently, but I think the audience on hacker News vastly underestimates the difficulty of setting up a personal site for the general public. There is always the refrain of "but just use static HTML!", as if anyone even knows what that is, as if it's so easy to set up a domain and hosting, as if no one even wants a nicely designed site with images and JavaScript th…

So for most people that are in the situation you describe I'd say they would probably just spin up a WordPress instance, pick a theme they like, and start posting.

A static html site? Even easier. There are tons of services out there that will let you host your own content for very little money or even free.

You can set up a static site on a platform like 1mb.com for next to nothing and edit the html, css, etc. To your hearts content. JavaScript mostly runs in the browser unless you're doing something more complicated than hosting your blog.

I taught myself HTML by reading source code when I was around 12 (I'm not a coder by trade). It's not a super complicated language. Nor is CSS. And there's sites like CSS Zen Garden, w3schools, and template sites all over the internet that ease that transition.

You talk about that general public, but this is a site mostly of techies, so it's natural that topics like this would be present here, far more natural than politics or posts on gossip at least. For the general public it's still pretty easy with numerous site builders, hosted solutions, etc. that will do all the heavy lifting for you. If you're not willing to take the time to learn, there's always someone who will charge you for their experience and make sure you're set up well enough to do what you need to. It can't be that hard to do with the proliferation of crackpots, marketers, and homemakers who are able to set up their own sites effectively.

While I can certainly sympathize and empathize with the idea that as a community we sometimes don't realize the difficulty in some things, on this particular topic, I think that between the market and open solutions there's a wide array of options available for someone to host their own blog with a number of entry ramps of differing difficulty.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#43

Post by Crinus » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

ibudiallo wrote: post #39

For my personal websites, I only ever tried wordpress around 10 years ago before I built my own from scratch. https://idiallo.com What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are: 1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...) 2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...) 3. Expensive hosting ($40/m+) The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple conten…

I like shared hosting, not only it is very cheap, but you do not get to bother with administration stuff. You cannot run everything you'd probably like, like in a VPS, but pretty much every provider has at least PHP support with some database and most also provide Python, Perl and CGI support (the latter wont be fast but you can use it to upload CGIs written in compiled languages like Go). If you stick with static sites (like i do) performance shouldn't be a problem at all.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#44

Post by cannonedhamster » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

cosmojg wrote: post #23

marktangotango wrote: post #20

What I’d like to see is a geocities but with: database, server side scripting, caching, memcache, and https free for limited use with a performance and availability guarantee. What would it take to get this on a massive scale?

Where would the funding come from?

Cloudfunding? It's like Kickstarter but for projects that are nearly guaranteed to die. Kind of like how patrons supported art. Most of the stuff was just workday or average, but every more and then there were gems.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#45

Post by dvtrn » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

gbuk2013 wrote: post #40

dvtrn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the pun here, heh but: Simply because it is very limiting. Seems like a limited/narrow definition of maintaining a website, just because there are different options of platforms and tools used to put content in the user's browser. Ultimately, for the browser, the result is the same, no? Edit: Following your edit, I can see an argument being made that maintaining static sites coming with a different workflow…

My advice is based on my own experience, so obviously I think it is true. It is my job to know a LOT about putting content in users browsers (from TCP protocol level up to the HTML) but I still think that GitHub pages is too limited for anything but very simple site. It’s cool to have a static site - it’s not cool to be forced to only have a static site.

I still think that GitHub pages is too limited for anything but very simple site

Oh we wont disagree there, it absolutely has its limitations.

You had originally stated you don't consider these types of stacks to be "running my own site" and I was just wondering what the distinction was, not to necessarily call into question or invalidate your own experiences-if I gave that impression, it's on me to communicate myself a bit better next time.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#46

Post by melling » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

gbuk2013 wrote: post #19

melling wrote: post #12

Any opinions on what are the best software choices for a single person to use in 2019 to build a website from scratch? I’d be willing to learn something new if I knew in 2 years, I’d be extremely productive.

Without knowing your OS: a text editor of some sort and an FTP/SFTP client. Then just get shared web hosting account - there are lots to chose from and they are super cheap these days. You can go a long way with that without having to mess around with maintaining your own server (unless you want to - I do :)

One person with a simple text editor isn’t going to be nearly as productive as someone who chooses a modern stack with better tools.

I left open my prior tools, etc so as not to bias the answers. I’ve done lots of Java, Python, Swift, some Go, etc but I’m willing to learn anything, so forget that you know that.

I’m looking for a big lever.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#47

Post by ibudiallo » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #41

ibudiallo wrote: post #39

For my personal websites, I only ever tried wordpress around 10 years ago before I built my own from scratch. https://idiallo.com What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are: 1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...) 2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...) 3. Expensive hosting ($40/m+) The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple conten…

I use the “clever hacks” because I’m afraid of one of my blog articles getting linked to on Reddit. Even if there are no ads on my site, I want it to stay up and readable, and I don’t want to suddenly get an egress-bandwidth bill in the process! Also, despite having done ops for years, I don’t want my continued willingness to do ops (as with DO/Linode/Vultr) or my continued usage of my small municipal ISP (or even my…

> I use the “clever hacks” because I’m afraid of one of my blog articles getting linked to on Reddit. Even if there are no ads on my site, I want it to stay up and readable, and I don’t want to suddenly get an egress-bandwidth bill!

I use DO. My site often gets linked on Reddit and hn and the $10 service handles it just fine. One article I wrote recently got 5 million web requests.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#48

Post by hugey010 » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

__mp wrote: post #21

melling wrote: post #12

Any opinions on what are the best software choices for a single person to use in 2019 to build a website from scratch? I’d be willing to learn something new if I knew in 2 years, I’d be extremely productive.

0) Get a cheap virtual/dedicated machine. 1) Install docker and docker-compose 2) Setup traefik, a reverse proxy, in docker (good starting point: https://docs.traefik.io/user-guide/docker-and-lets-encrypt/ ). 3) Run $docker container (ghost, wordpress...). I typically use one docker-compose file for each domain. "expose" is not necessary because the requests are proxied by traefik. Here's a docker-compose sample for…

Completely agree with the ease of this setup as it's been my goto for roughly a year.

Put Docker on your VM / instance, make a project with a docker-compose that just ties one or many services together with traefik as the reverse proxy (I use CNAMEs or subdomain routing - path routing & stripping adds complexity and breaks many apps).

For the actual site you can choose any stack you desire. I'd recommend node / express over wordpress for a simple site, but you can rock a flavor of the month, or whatever your experience allows you to be productive in - Swift Vapor, go, php, .NET... then dockerize your site.

Deploys and execution should be identical locally and remotely. If you get popular, you are in a great place to scale out compared to many traditional stacks. If you want to try out another service, tool, database, whatever; just add it to the docker-compose, run docker-compose down/up, and there she is.

There is a sharp initial learning curve with Docker - images, containers and their layers, volumes, networks and ports, and how all that interacts with the host machine. Containerization is arguable something you won't be able to ignore forever. The advantages are just too numerous and appealing, especially for the hero solo developer!

Re: Run Your Own Website

#49

Post by superkuh » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #35

superkuh wrote: post #33

Yup. People tend to assume running your own site is difficult but running a static webserver is dead simple. As long as you don't involve all the unneeded dynamic language and database it's secure and doesn't really need updating all the time either. 90% of people can run a static web server on their home connection and it would fulfill their every requirement (as well as solving almost all 'problems' that exist on t…

Mm, nah. Running a DNS server, choosing an HTTP server and keeping all the related software up to date is a lot to ask even of a techie. And that's not even getting into dynamic IP issues.

Why do you need to run a DNS server? My IP only changes once every few years with Comcast. I use one of the many free DNS services available online (been w/zoneedit for almost 2 decades) and set it manually when it does change. But they also support dyndns that most home routers have options to use for updates.

Most webservers are very secure when they're not running php and mysql too. They have far less of a security problem than a browser executing arbitrary javascript and require updating only once a year or two, if at all.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#50

Post by ryandrake » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #12

Any opinions on what are the best software choices for a single person to use in 2019 to build a website from scratch? I’d be willing to learn something new if I knew in 2 years, I’d be extremely productive.

An Xterm running vi has been my personal web site editing software of choice for two decades. Still works!