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> AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet fo

> AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet for anyone to use for free. I have been running complete web applications from home for free for anyone to use for a long time. That is what the web is about - you don't need a dedicated, centralized host. Anyone can connect to it and anyone can run servers on it. It isn't terribly difficult to do, nor costly, I do it on a budget residential broadband connection. Granted, it might not scale to millions of users, but neither will heroku's or AWS's free/low-cost tiers either.

Brendinooo 10y ago
Is it within the terms of service for your ISP to do so? I was always under the impression that if your provider caught you trying to do that they'd lock you out and make you get a business plan, but I suppose I never took the time to figure out an answer for sure.
- destructionator 10y ago
  My ISP's terms of service prohibit commercial use, but I don't view anything I do there as commercial (most people who play with my home hosted apps or read my blog are essentially friends anyway...), and after 11 years, nobody from the cable company has complained about my bandwidth/traffic patterns either. Besides, even if the ISP had an arbitrary restriction, I think that runs afoul of net neutrality rules and may be illegal now in the US.
- dingaling 10y ago
  > Is it within the terms of service for your ISP to do so? I That depends on which ISP you choose. It is not really our concern what you do with your internet connection any more than it is the concern of the power company what you do with the electricity they supply ... However, we ask that you do not use the service for anything illegal http://aa.net.uk/legal-aup.html http://aa.net.uk/legal-aup.html
- boyaka 10y ago
  These types of restrictions are exactly what refute the grandparent's claim that the web is more open today. Legislation, copyright, centralization and consolidation of services (ISP, cloud applications, cloud servers) have certainly made the Internet more powerful, but these trends have weakened what the Web was really about, as stated in the parent. For me one of the greatest times of freedom was during the life of Geocities. This was actually the only time I had a website, and I was in middle school. Sure, there was a lot less people on the Internet, but it was a very wild wild west atmosphere and I feel like a larger portion of the users created their own home pages than today. Malicious parties were not as widespread and powerful, and there was overall not so much control over everything. I was also using Napster at this time. I've studied computer engineering and I've still had a hard time having the feeling / spirit of freedom and ease of contributing to the Internet as I did back then. Maybe it's because I'm not creative anymore, or because I'm too cheap to pay for or too disinterested in putting my content onto services, or because there's a lot more to worry about with running your own server, or because there's too much visibility/scrutiny/copyright enforcement. Doesn't have the same feeling of openness as back then.
  - z3t4 10y ago
    More reasons why you do not have your own homepage ... discoverability: If there are no one linking to your webpage you do not exist. It's as Google broke the web by making a too good search engine. Most sites now a days is just a dead end, while web sites used to have lots of links that let you dig deeper into the subject. And instead of finding ten quality and peer-reviewed articles you now find thousand of crappy search-optimized articles. Then there's the lock-in again. Instead of writing your web sites in pure HTML, they are now locked inside a database in some content management system. You can't simply move to another provider. Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive. There need to be a free top level domain name so that web addresses stay longer then a year. Maybe only allow ten free domains per person to prevent hoarding.
    - tdkl 10y ago
      > Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive. Really ? A year of a .com, .net, .org costs less then monthly internet bill. Not to mention there have been many services offering subdomains of a rich domain list in the past. I used them in the beginning of high school before finally buying a .net, putting it on a home DNS server with IPv6 tunnel and gain "l33t" points on IRC with a custom hostname.

Brendinooo 10y ago

Is it within the terms of service for your ISP to do so? I was always under the impression that if your provider caught you trying to do that they'd lock you out and make you get a business plan, but I suppose I never took the time to figure out an answer for sure.

destructionator 10y ago
My ISP's terms of service prohibit commercial use, but I don't view anything I do there as commercial (most people who play with my home hosted apps or read my blog are essentially friends anyway...), and after 11 years, nobody from the cable company has complained about my bandwidth/traffic patterns either. Besides, even if the ISP had an arbitrary restriction, I think that runs afoul of net neutrality rules and may be illegal now in the US.
dingaling 10y ago
> Is it within the terms of service for your ISP to do so? I That depends on which ISP you choose. It is not really our concern what you do with your internet connection any more than it is the concern of the power company what you do with the electricity they supply ... However, we ask that you do not use the service for anything illegal http://aa.net.uk/legal-aup.html http://aa.net.uk/legal-aup.html
boyaka 10y ago
These types of restrictions are exactly what refute the grandparent's claim that the web is more open today. Legislation, copyright, centralization and consolidation of services (ISP, cloud applications, cloud servers) have certainly made the Internet more powerful, but these trends have weakened what the Web was really about, as stated in the parent. For me one of the greatest times of freedom was during the life of Geocities. This was actually the only time I had a website, and I was in middle school. Sure, there was a lot less people on the Internet, but it was a very wild wild west atmosphere and I feel like a larger portion of the users created their own home pages than today. Malicious parties were not as widespread and powerful, and there was overall not so much control over everything. I was also using Napster at this time. I've studied computer engineering and I've still had a hard time having the feeling / spirit of freedom and ease of contributing to the Internet as I did back then. Maybe it's because I'm not creative anymore, or because I'm too cheap to pay for or too disinterested in putting my content onto services, or because there's a lot more to worry about with running your own server, or because there's too much visibility/scrutiny/copyright enforcement. Doesn't have the same feeling of openness as back then.
- z3t4 10y ago
  More reasons why you do not have your own homepage ... discoverability: If there are no one linking to your webpage you do not exist. It's as Google broke the web by making a too good search engine. Most sites now a days is just a dead end, while web sites used to have lots of links that let you dig deeper into the subject. And instead of finding ten quality and peer-reviewed articles you now find thousand of crappy search-optimized articles. Then there's the lock-in again. Instead of writing your web sites in pure HTML, they are now locked inside a database in some content management system. You can't simply move to another provider. Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive. There need to be a free top level domain name so that web addresses stay longer then a year. Maybe only allow ten free domains per person to prevent hoarding.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    > Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive. Really ? A year of a .com, .net, .org costs less then monthly internet bill. Not to mention there have been many services offering subdomains of a rich domain list in the past. I used them in the beginning of high school before finally buying a .net, putting it on a home DNS server with IPv6 tunnel and gain "l33t" points on IRC with a custom hostname.