I am now taking bets on how long it will last. 'This site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B in the author's living room (behind the couch)'
Longer than the porn site it's talking about at least
The OP site is down, the porn site is up right now...
A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
51–60 of 93 posts
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#52> This site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B in the author's living room (behind the couch). Holding up quite well despite HN frontpage. I love what a bit of caching can do. EDIT: appears I jinxed it. I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense.
Sorry for the ot, but do you have any recommendation for $10 vps?
Look on lowendbox
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#53> This site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B in the author's living room (behind the couch). Holding up quite well despite HN frontpage. I love what a bit of caching can do. EDIT: appears I jinxed it. I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense.
Sorry for the ot, but do you have any recommendation for $10 vps?
[deleted]
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#54> This site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B in the author's living room (behind the couch). Holding up quite well despite HN frontpage. I love what a bit of caching can do. EDIT: appears I jinxed it. I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense.
Sorry for the ot, but do you have any recommendation for $10 vps?
You can get Oracle Cloud Free for ... free.
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#55> This site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B in the author's living room (behind the couch). Holding up quite well despite HN frontpage. I love what a bit of caching can do. EDIT: appears I jinxed it. I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense.
Sorry for the ot, but do you have any recommendation for $10 vps?
I used to browse lowendbox which occasionally has good deals from smaller companies who've been around for at least a few years but there's always a risk one day they'll sell, shut down operations or worse just disappear. However, if budget is your number one priority, you can get a years VPS hosting for low double digit dollars a year.
Nowadays a host personal projects on scaleway and netcup (EU based). I've been with the first for a could of years and the second for 6 months now, good service from both.
If you're mainly hosting static* or cacheable content, you may even get by with a raspberry pi running behind cloudflare's free plan with cache enabled. If you don't mind all traffic to your site being served by such a third party of course.
* If you only have static content, GitHub pages can be considered too.
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#56> This site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B in the author's living room (behind the couch). Holding up quite well despite HN frontpage. I love what a bit of caching can do. EDIT: appears I jinxed it. I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense.
> I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense When you're hosting static content (like presumably this content is; it's down so I can't say for sure), you should distribute it on a CDN for $0/year. A single VPS can be overwhelmed by traffic just as your Raspberry Pi can.
Properly cached, a single core on a low end VPS should be able to carry some serious weight.
But yeah, I agree. This is static content, and should be hosted on any of the gazillion free tier CDNs. But then you don’t get that warm fuzzy feeling of watching the rPi behind your couch melt into the floor.
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m using a Linode $5 running nginx for static here.
$5 a year?
$5/mo - but there are plenty of decent VPS for $5/yr - the catch is they will be IPv6 only for port 80 so you chuck it behind Cloudflare (carrying static load as well).
The low end world will shock anyone who has only ever seen AWS pricing.
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#58The site in question is charts.dft.gov.uk (VERY NSFW). It resolves to the CNAME charts.dft.gov.uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com, which is quite clearly hosting a porn site of some kind. I suppose there's a few possible explanations here: (1) the original site was hosted on S3, and at some point the bucket was dropped and someone else picked it up, (2) it was originally hosted on S3 and the bucket got hacked, (3)…
I don't think it was #3: Amazon owns and resolves it for amazonaws.com. If you could hack that, you could do much more serious damage. I'm assuming it's #1. Bucket names are global.
I believe scenario #3 would be as follows:
1. gov.uk’s DNS server used to point charts.dft.gov.uk to something legitimate 2. Someone hacked gov.uk’s DNS server, and changed this one specific domain to CNAME charts.dft.gov.uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com 3. That same someone set up their porn thing at AWS in a bucket that maps to charts.dft.gov.uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#59Both my own site (on a Pi behind the couch) and the gov site were subjected to the hug of death. I've moved thecrow.uk onto a VPS for now and it's back up. Hurray!
Re: A Gov.uk site dedicated to porn?
#60I don't know if this is laziness and ineptitude on the govt's part or not. You see the design team for UK gov websites have been getting a lot of attention and praise for their efforts, the most recent being here just ten days ago on the subject of check boxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29238968 .
Now anyone with a rudimentary handle of the English language would probably have noticed the misspelling of carcasses on the blogpost https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/15/letting-users-tic... and Yorwba highlighted this on 17 November 2021 as seen in the comments. The team duly acknowledge this as seen with the updated image here https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/53/... and the original misspelling can still be seen here https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/53/...
Anyway, it would seem their commenting system will not allow links to be posted to them or they choose to ignore links or didn't understand the comment posted when comments like "https://www.bing.com/search?q=plural+of+carcass" come through to them which is metadata for the type of filtering being employed on their comments section.
I think its worth looking at their design principles which can be seen here https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles "#1 Start with user needs Service design starts with identifying user needs. If you don’t know what the user needs are, you won’t build the right thing. Do research, analyse data, talk to users. Don’t make assumptions. Have empathy for users, and remember that what they ask for isn’t always what they need."
It would seem Grant Shapps Secretary of State for Transport is perhaps actually meeting the public's needs or maybe its what he thinks of the public. Are we solitary handy manipulators of parts of the body?