9 ms·
A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and acce
by smg 9y ago
A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable.
For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete control over the content is far more valuable than the audience that Medium brings. Mirroring posts to Medium can still allow me to reach that audience.
- api 9y agoWhy do you even need a CDN? GitHub will host static sites for free and updating is a git push. S3 will as well for pennies a month unless your site is huge.
- sulam 9y ago“I fled Medium because they are a profit making enterprise that rando-bans people.” “Cool, where’d you go?” “GitHub pages.” “...”
- greyman 9y agoThere is some bandwidth limit, though, and with CDN your site could also get better response times, since they will serve content from a server with better proximity to visitors.
- daurnimator 9y agoIs there a practical limit for gh-pages though? I think you get flagged for manual review if you're high traffic; but as long as you're serving content I don't know of anyone being taken down (and I have heard about some great lengths gone to to keep things up). And you can put a CDN in front of gh-pages too! I have done that with cloudflare a couple of times for relatives that want to run a static site and super low cost.
- adventured 9y agoDoes GitHub not push its static content from a traditional CDN, or something effectively simulating a CDN (just a lot of servers spread across the globe)? I don't know offhand, it'd be surprising if they don't given the scale in question.
- coaxial 9y agoNetlify does all this for free IIRC.
- osteele 9y agoI don't believe you can use HTTPS with a custom domain (a domain that doesn't end in github.io or amazonaws.com), with GitHub pages or S3. Two free choices I'm aware of, for hosting at a URL that both future-proofs your choice of hosting provider and provides end-to-end encryption to site visitors, are the free CloudFlare plan in front of GitHub or S3 (or any other static hosting service), and the free hosting plan on Netlify.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoIf you want to go the free route, you can use CloudFlare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-and-fast-github-pages-with-cloudflare/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-and-fast-github-pages-wit... -- you have to use CF for your DNS, but it is also free for basic use
- EpicEng 9y agoYou can, we use S3 at my company to host a site used by pathologists to sign out reports. How we did that... I'd have to ask my coworker, but we have https and a custom domain.
- grogenaut 9y agoAws cert manager (acm) now does this for any domain you can verify
- osteele 9y agoIt looks[1] like you can use Cert Manager with CloudFront[2], but not directly with S3. CloudFront is very cheap[3], but it is not free. (For that matter, S3 itself is cheap but not free.) It's therefore a solution to “I'm employed in a developed nation and don't want to notice that I'm paying for hosting”, but not to “I have literally no money to spare for hosting because a year is less than coffee” or “I want my content to stay up without my having to remember to keep a valid credit card on file somewhere”. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-services.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-service... [2] CloudFront ≠ CloudFlare. Nobody in this thread has been confused about this, but it tends to trip people up. [3] I ran tech ops for a company whose site was, on launch day, around the 55th-most-popular site on the internet. I think our CloudFront bill was $300 for that day.
- greyman 9y ago> You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. While this is certainly true, the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons, or will do so only if the content is clearly illegal or disturbing. If they will freely censor people, there's not much point of their existence.
- matte_black 9y agoThere is a point for the vast majority of people who are unlikely to be censored. Don’t be a fatalist.
- RyanZAG 9y agoSomething can be both bad (in a moral sense) and useful. In fact, most bad things are useful.
- matte_black 9y agoBut certainly even a bad thing can have a point to it’s existence.
- srslack 9y ago>the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons They threw out their integrity as a publishing platform when they updated their ToS a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431403 Indeed, there is not much of a point to their existence when they throw this away, other than being a virtue signalling magazine with unpaid authors that doesn't even follow their own vague ToS. This week has been horrible for speech and freedom on the web. But surely a much needed reminder that suppressing speech does not work. The remedy is more speech, not less: http://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech http://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech Without holding this uncompromising stance, I'm of the opinion that one cannot call themselves a liberal, in a liberal democracy. It is the cornerstone of a functioning, modern liberal democracy, and the recent trend of this self-censorship by big technology companies is worrying.
- ken 9y ago> Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. That's putting it mildly! I host a (small) static webpage on AWS S3 + CloudFront, and my monthly bill is 56 cents.
- wdn 9y agoCan you write a how to guide on this?
- dfee 9y ago[0] add files to S3 [1] configure Route53 to show those files at a domain name with permissions [2] use Cloudfront as a CDN to that S3 data. [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/upload-objects.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/uploa... [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/RoutingToS3Bucket.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/Ro... [2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigrateS3ToCloudFront.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
- huy-nguyen 9y agoI use GatsbyJS, a static site generator, to create my blog and use Netlify for continuous deployment + hosting. Netlify also provides free CDN and SSL.
- ken 9y agoSure, I could do that. Just yesterday someone described AWS as an "Ikea" construction set, where it's all there but you have to figure it out (and the AWS documentation is not very good). I need to start blogging, anyway, so thanks for the push.
- JoshMnem 9y agoIt would be free on netlify.com.
- foepys 9y agoI'm always afraid that those free services start to change their policies and suddenly your site doesn't work without you knowing. The 60 cents for hosting it somewhere I have a business relationship with, rather than a simple ToS, are easily worth it.
- jimnotgym 9y agoStatic site plus Netlify for me. Publishing is drag-and-drop or a git push away. reminds me I need to write a blog post
- gnbfulbvgjbvv 9y agoWhat about github pages plus cloudflare? 100% free
- Retr0spectrum 9y agoThat doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves it to github. At least you have a clearer path to move your content to another platform, if needed.
- chiefalchemist 9y agoAgreed. But I think you can do both. That is have your own self-hosted and then __occasionally__ do a Medium post for audience, etc. If it helps, envision Medium as a social network. You share to FB, TW, etc. Medium would be a slightly longer post.
- dpats 9y agoAs a reader, I use Medium because it recommends articles that I enjoy and probably won't otherwise come across. I would appreciate publishers who follow your solution of doing both!
- gkya 9y agoYeah that's until your CDN or hosting provider decides to censor your. Turns out those are a for profit centralised service too, way more often than not.