4 ms·

Great read and serving 2500 hits/sec for $15 is awesome! Even better: in Digital Ocean you could have a snapshot of your server and if needed deploy another nod

Great read and serving 2500 hits/sec for $15 is awesome! Even better: in Digital Ocean you could have a snapshot of your server and if needed deploy another node in minutes. Off-topic: how does rebuilding the blog's menu/index works with Jeckyll? Say you add one entry under home/foo/bar and you have hundreds of pages. Will it actually re-create hundreds of html pages to update the navigation? Or does it use some sort of HTML include/JS magic?

mrb 10y ago
It depends on the Jekyll template. With mine the list of posts is only displayed in the top-level index.html, so only this file needs to be updated when adding a post.
curun1r 10y ago
> serving 2500 hits/sec for $15 is awesome That's peak...I doubt he'd still be paying $15/mo if he was sustaining that kind of traffic. Even as lean as his site is (looks like it's a bit over a kilobyte being served from his domain...wow!), 2.5 MB/sec is around 6.5 TB/mo, which would cost another ~$100/mo from DO. However unless you have some desire to roll your own setup and maintain/admin the servers, I just don't see the rationale for hosting your own statically-generated site. GH Pages is free. And if you need more than what it offers, Netlify's $7.50/mo plan will be fine for more than 90% of these kinds of blogs and has many advantages...no servers to maintain or worry about going down, use of Akamai's network for faster content delivery, and automatic site builds from source code. And all for less than a 2-server hosted setup. And there's also Surge, Forge and a few other competitors in that space, so it's not like you'd get locked into a single vendor.
- mrb 10y ago
  The main rationale for hosting my own site is that I do not want to depend on a single provider, ever. Using GH, or Akamai, or Cloudflare, etc means putting all your eggs in one basket. And outages do happen at these companies. I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the chance of a single outage at a single CDN. Not because of technical reasons, after all they are extremely redundant, but because of process reasons: they are a single company with company-wide processes and sometimes human errors happen causing company-wide outages. I do realize it sounds silly to be obsessed as I am with redundancy :) but I love exploring these sorts of ideas to see how well they work in practice.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    > I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the chance of a single outage at a single CDN. I'm not sure I'd agree with that. You're probably running a pretty similar software stack on each box, so there's a chance that a software update could take down all three or a vulnerability could put all three at risk. I also have a hard time believing that any one cloud virtual server has many 9s uptime, so 3 together isn't likely to get you to Akamai's level. But I prefer to rely on the large players simply because there's advantages to staying with the herd. If Akamai has an outage, much of the internet will be down. People will see that your site is down and attribute it to a larger problem. If your 3 boxes have a problem or your DNS provider has a problem, the fact that your site is down will be more apparent to users. Also, uptime is not just a function of the percentage chance of an outage. The time to recovery also matters. What kind of monitoring do you have in place? How long are your outages likely to last vs those of a large player? If it take you 24 hours to recognize a failed server, then the chances of all 3 failing in a 24 hour period are probably a lot higher than a big player having an outage. There's a lot that goes into high availability that you just don't get by putting your eggs in three small baskets.
    - mrb 10y ago
      "I also have a hard time believing that any one cloud virtual server has many 9s uptime, so 3 together isn't likely to get you to Akamai's level." Actually even if the servers are only 98% available (7 days of downtime per year!) then they provide 99.9992% availability, aka "five 9s": 1-((1-.98)^3) = 0.999992 Of course this statistical result assumes downtimes are random and uncorrelated. As you say the risks is that a common bug or vulnerability affects all 3 of them at the same time. Hopefully this risk is mitigated because my software stack is extremely simple (a web server serving static files + ~400 lines of Python code) and I will not be performing software updates on all 3 servers at the same time. "or your DNS provider has a problem" I do not use a provider, but run 3 parallel authoritative DNS servers on these 3 servers :)

mrb 10y ago

It depends on the Jekyll template. With mine the list of posts is only displayed in the top-level index.html, so only this file needs to be updated when adding a post.

curun1r 10y ago

> serving 2500 hits/sec for $15 is awesome That's peak...I doubt he'd still be paying $15/mo if he was sustaining that kind of traffic. Even as lean as his site is (looks like it's a bit over a kilobyte being served from his domain...wow!), 2.5 MB/sec is around 6.5 TB/mo, which would cost another ~$100/mo from DO. However unless you have some desire to roll your own setup and maintain/admin the servers, I just don't see the rationale for hosting your own statically-generated site. GH Pages is free. And if you need more than what it offers, Netlify's $7.50/mo plan will be fine for more than 90% of these kinds of blogs and has many advantages...no servers to maintain or worry about going down, use of Akamai's network for faster content delivery, and automatic site builds from source code. And all for less than a 2-server hosted setup. And there's also Surge, Forge and a few other competitors in that space, so it's not like you'd get locked into a single vendor.

mrb 10y ago
The main rationale for hosting my own site is that I do not want to depend on a single provider, ever. Using GH, or Akamai, or Cloudflare, etc means putting all your eggs in one basket. And outages do happen at these companies. I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the chance of a single outage at a single CDN. Not because of technical reasons, after all they are extremely redundant, but because of process reasons: they are a single company with company-wide processes and sometimes human errors happen causing company-wide outages. I do realize it sounds silly to be obsessed as I am with redundancy :) but I love exploring these sorts of ideas to see how well they work in practice.
- curun1r 10y ago
  > I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the chance of a single outage at a single CDN. I'm not sure I'd agree with that. You're probably running a pretty similar software stack on each box, so there's a chance that a software update could take down all three or a vulnerability could put all three at risk. I also have a hard time believing that any one cloud virtual server has many 9s uptime, so 3 together isn't likely to get you to Akamai's level. But I prefer to rely on the large players simply because there's advantages to staying with the herd. If Akamai has an outage, much of the internet will be down. People will see that your site is down and attribute it to a larger problem. If your 3 boxes have a problem or your DNS provider has a problem, the fact that your site is down will be more apparent to users. Also, uptime is not just a function of the percentage chance of an outage. The time to recovery also matters. What kind of monitoring do you have in place? How long are your outages likely to last vs those of a large player? If it take you 24 hours to recognize a failed server, then the chances of all 3 failing in a 24 hour period are probably a lot higher than a big player having an outage. There's a lot that goes into high availability that you just don't get by putting your eggs in three small baskets.
  - mrb 10y ago
    "I also have a hard time believing that any one cloud virtual server has many 9s uptime, so 3 together isn't likely to get you to Akamai's level." Actually even if the servers are only 98% available (7 days of downtime per year!) then they provide 99.9992% availability, aka "five 9s": 1-((1-.98)^3) = 0.999992 Of course this statistical result assumes downtimes are random and uncorrelated. As you say the risks is that a common bug or vulnerability affects all 3 of them at the same time. Hopefully this risk is mitigated because my software stack is extremely simple (a web server serving static files + ~400 lines of Python code) and I will not be performing software updates on all 3 servers at the same time. "or your DNS provider has a problem" I do not use a provider, but run 3 parallel authoritative DNS servers on these 3 servers :)