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Magit manuals are available online again

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Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#51

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…

Especially when Cloudflare Pages is free with unlimited bandwidth, if you don't need any other backend. The only limit is 100 custom domains and 500 builds per month in their CI/CD, the latter of which you can bypass by just building everything in Github Actions and pushing it to Pages.

Because Cloudflare pages has this doofy deploy limit hanging over your head. Even if you won't reasonably run into it, it's still weird. R2's free limits are significantly higher.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#52
post #26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it were that easy.

The poison's also the cure! Just ask AI for a haproxy rate limit config

It will give one. Will it work? No. You seem to not understand that AI crawlers mask as multiple clients to avoid rate limiting and are quite skilled at that.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#53
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, people are held hostage by "professionals" that will set up some overcomplicated backend or vercel stuff instead of a static single html page with opening hours and the menu.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#55
This is a good reminder of the real financial costs incurred by maintainers of your favorite Emacs packages.

Here's a nice repo with details on how to support them!

https://github.com/tarsius/elisp-maintainers

Also worth pointing out that the author of Magit has made the unusual choice to make a living off developing Emacs packages. I've been happy to pitch in my own hard earned cash in return for the awesomeness that Magit is!

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other? That's not really true if you care about reliability. You need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes (via DNS or a load balancer or etc). You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to make that work, and it's way more complicated than chucki…

> That's not really true if you care about reliability While reliability is always some concern, we are talking about a website containing docs for a nerdy tool used by a minuscule percentage of developers. No one will complain if it goes down for 1h daily.

With the uptime guarantees AWS, GCS, DO, etc. provide - it will probably 1h per 365 days accumulative (@ 99.99% uptime). 2 nodes for a simple static site is just overkill.

But, honestly, for this: just use github pages. It's OSS and GitHub is already used. They can use a separate repository to host the docs if repo size from assets are a concern (e.g. videos).

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A year ago I researched this topic for a static website of my own. All providers I looked at were $5 and I want to say the cheapest I found was slightly lower. By comparison, I am still within free tier limits of AWS S3 and cloudfront (CDN) since I am not getting much traffic. So my website is on edge locations all over the world as part of their CDN for free, but if I host on a single server in Ohio it costs $5/mont…

Did you check NearlyFreeSpeech.net? If you are getting little traffic it costs practically nothing for a static site.

Thank you! That did not come up in my search, but it looks great and is reasonably priced. I may use that for another project.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#58

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…

Seems like the maintainer just tried AWS out of curiosity, and never needed to optimize hosting until scrapers suddenly slammed the site.

That's exactly what I did! Though I would call it morbid curiosity. :P

After initial setup it was smooth sailing. Other more reasonable setups would also have been smooth sailing, but... they weren't setup yet. I was uneasy about the possibility of a surprise bill happening, as it eventually did, but until the brain dead LLM leeches came along, that just never happened. After a decade of it not happening, I wasn't that concerned anymore, but I guess when it comes to the AI bots, I had my head in the sand a bit. I still though something like a 500% bill might happen, not 5000%.

Once it did happen, I immediately shut my sides down, and within the hour the account was no more. On the way out I saw that you can now actually set a "spending limit", it still had a [new] next to it. I tried setting it up, but could only quickly figure out how to setup a notification. It might be possible to set an actual spending limit, but not in a few minutes -- probably got to read some documentation for that.

But even if this were a one click setting, it wouldn't have made a difference at this point. You do this once and I am gone. Also, I wanted to move away from Amazon anyway, so really, this was the kick in the pants that I needed.

For now I am using Github Pages for the very static parts, and the free hosting provided by my email provider, for the slightly less static manuals generated with Github Actions. I would have made sense to use Github for both (not least so that Microsoft could cover the cost of the bots they have unleashed), but I wanted to avoid the complexity of committing to the same pages repository from the CI pipelines of multiple package repositories.

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#59

I love Magit, it's the only git gui I can stomach (it helps that I use Emacs already). I donated a bit of money to help tarsius offset the cost of AWS LLM abuse, well deserved for the value I've gotten from his tools.

Thanks!

Yesterday evening I saw that I had a few new sponsors and was wondering where they had come from.

So in the end something good came of it. The one time donations covered the bill, and I also got a few new monthly sponsors. (Well, unless you also take the hours into account that it took me to move to new hosting, then its way way below minimal wage, but as a maintainer of free software, I am used to that by now.)

Sooo... I guess I should take the opportunity and do a bit of marketing. I am still making a living maintaining Magit et al., so please consider sponsoring my day to day work too. Thanks!

Re: Magit manuals are available online again

#60
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really high bandwidth costs in general. I've never worked anywhere large enough to hit them, but I've heard inter-AZ traffic in the same region can become quite expensive once you're big enough

Watch out for NAT Gateway, too. An extra $0.045/GB in both directions.

True, those are also a foot gun--especially for AWS services where you'd want to, instead, switch to VPC Endpoints above a trivial amount of traffic (I think the endpoint interface is like $2/mon so has a small cost)
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