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I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little tec

I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.

afarrell 10y ago
There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things. My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like weebly would not exist. The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.
- webtechgal 10y ago
  > There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file... So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time. The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site. As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!! Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
- obj-g 10y ago
  But perhaps if your whole goal is to be a "web artist" or however you define what he was doing, you might take the time to learn how to make a simple site.
  - sp332 10y ago
    And maybe if your actual work is keeping you busy, you might not want to have to deal with all that on top of it.
    - obj-g 10y ago
      You might not want to, but maybe you should. Case in point.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        Not case in point. Whether you make your own site is completely orthogonal to whether you have backups. There are people that use blogger or wordpress for free and back it up, and there are people that pay for hosting or servers to host customized websites and don't back them up.
        obj-g 10y ago
        You're right, I guess. I suppose I worded it poorly. I really just meant that if you're going to be a "web artist" you should probably be a bit more web savvy in general. Make your own site, learn about backing up, etc.
macspoofing 10y ago
If the end-goal is not to lose shit, then self-hosting isn't helping you with that.
webtechgal 10y ago
As a web dev/tech freelancer, I come across typical end-users very frequently and you would be _amazed_ at the amount of ignorance about the issues like domains, hosting etc. prevailing amongst them. While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.
- zouhair 10y ago
  Why should we expect people to know any of that? Amazed is the wrong word, I'll be amazed if they knew any of it.
enlightenedfool 10y ago
And it only costs $10-15/yr for your own domain + email. I don't understand why people consider that a great expense.
- hackits 10y ago
  I just spent $1100 on a new mobile phone I don't have that kind of money!
- gajjanag 10y ago
  The problem is not necessarily the expense - there are a whole bunch of steps that need to be taken in order to ensure that the big hosts don't flag your mails as spam - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126. And even if it seems to be working fine at the moment, there are no practical guarantees that this will not be subject to change: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA. Even someone as high profile as Linus Torvalds had to resort to the classic method of public shaming in order to get a prompt response. Lastly, there is not much incentive even if I cared about privacy - my typical recipient is anyway a Gmail account, so Google can definitely construct a shadow profile for the sender even if the sender does not use Gmail. Again, it is a classic problem of a heavily centralized internet.

afarrell 10y ago

There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things. My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like weebly would not exist. The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.

webtechgal 10y ago
> There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file... So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time. The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site. As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!! Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
obj-g 10y ago
But perhaps if your whole goal is to be a "web artist" or however you define what he was doing, you might take the time to learn how to make a simple site.
- sp332 10y ago
  And maybe if your actual work is keeping you busy, you might not want to have to deal with all that on top of it.
  - obj-g 10y ago
    You might not want to, but maybe you should. Case in point.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Not case in point. Whether you make your own site is completely orthogonal to whether you have backups. There are people that use blogger or wordpress for free and back it up, and there are people that pay for hosting or servers to host customized websites and don't back them up.
      - obj-g 10y ago
        You're right, I guess. I suppose I worded it poorly. I really just meant that if you're going to be a "web artist" you should probably be a bit more web savvy in general. Make your own site, learn about backing up, etc.

macspoofing 10y ago

If the end-goal is not to lose shit, then self-hosting isn't helping you with that.

webtechgal 10y ago

As a web dev/tech freelancer, I come across typical end-users very frequently and you would be _amazed_ at the amount of ignorance about the issues like domains, hosting etc. prevailing amongst them. While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.

zouhair 10y ago
Why should we expect people to know any of that? Amazed is the wrong word, I'll be amazed if they knew any of it.

enlightenedfool 10y ago

And it only costs $10-15/yr for your own domain + email. I don't understand why people consider that a great expense.

hackits 10y ago
I just spent $1100 on a new mobile phone I don't have that kind of money!
gajjanag 10y ago
The problem is not necessarily the expense - there are a whole bunch of steps that need to be taken in order to ensure that the big hosts don't flag your mails as spam - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126. And even if it seems to be working fine at the moment, there are no practical guarantees that this will not be subject to change: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA. Even someone as high profile as Linus Torvalds had to resort to the classic method of public shaming in order to get a prompt response. Lastly, there is not much incentive even if I cared about privacy - my typical recipient is anyway a Gmail account, so Google can definitely construct a shadow profile for the sender even if the sender does not use Gmail. Again, it is a classic problem of a heavily centralized internet.