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You were wrong technically but you have a point. These sites should leverage existing services like reddit or AWS. Personally I'd put a static information site

You were wrong technically but you have a point. These sites should leverage existing services like reddit or AWS. Personally I'd put a static information site on AWS and a community on Reddit if I was the creator for something like this game. It's just like SMB's today don't really need much infrastructure, well open source projects shouldn't either.

capableweb 5y ago
That's a horrible idea. Yes, open source should definitely get off closed and abusive platforms like Reddit or AWS. Really, the open source community should start dog fooding more. It seems like yesterday all the communities were on IRC and it was easy to find everyone as long as you were connected to Freenode. Now everyone is using Slack, Discord or other closed-sourced systems that are not even built for the use case of "open by default". It's really sad to see, especially when a lot of developers in the ecosystem are cheering on projects moving to platforms like reddit or AWS. To run your own infrastructure is not as hard as you think, and it gets a lot cheaper too.
- INTPenis 5y ago
  I completely get where you're coming from, I'm a staunch self hoster myself. But why re-invent the wheel before you have to? That's just a waste of time and resources that could be used to promote and build your project. Like in this very case, the website is now down and unable to promote the project because it was made in a traditional way. Imho it's enough to retain ownership of domains to really own a project. Like the widelands.org domain. So whatever happens with AWS, or reddit, that domain can always move and point visitors to new communities. In my personal selfhosting environment I have my own domain pointed to protonmail. So even if protonmail goes belly up I can always move my domain somewhere else. And even my domain is picked to give me maximum control. I use my own country's ccTLD because they have a good conflict resolution department that will benefit me as a citizen.
mst 5y ago
The forum's a more complicated question but for the static information site for an open source project that's already hosting its code on github, configuring a custom domain for the github pages site would seem even simpler than sticking it on AWS.
wyager 5y ago
Even running a site that front-pages HN doesn’t actually require that much infrastructure. Peak traffic is a few hundred RPS. Or at least it was when I was still using google analytics. Might be more now. But in any case, if you use fast web software you can serve dynamic content to an HN ddos off a $5/mo VPS. The problem is a lot of people will be like “well my website doesn’t need to be fast because it’s not popular, so I’ll write it in python/node/ruby and make it dynamic” and then their server falls over at 50 RPS on commodity hardware, when if they’d written it with a popular haskell/rust/go/whatever framework, it could handle 100x that much traffic. If you hope that your writing ever reaches a large audience, you need to be able to serve a large audience! It doesn’t take that much extra work to be ready for it.
- account42 5y ago
  I think your getting downvoted because of the python/node/ruby vs. haskell/rust/go comment and perhaps rightly so. For some things this will certainly matter, but for a public content like this, especially the landing page, the real problem is that a flood of visitors should not all be hitting any dynamic backend in the first place - they are all going to see exactly the same page anyway. That means either making it completely static (would mean removing the sidebar in this case) or having a modest (micro-)caching setup so that most requests don't hit the backend. With nginx (which is what widelands.org seems to be using) this is only a couple of lines of configuration, no need to change the dynamic backend at all.
  - wyager 5y ago
    Needing to use a reverse proxy like nginx in the first place is honestly insane, and the fact that many web devs tolerate it is a sign of totally whack priorities. You shouldn’t need a reverse proxy to serve your website, and you should be able to serve dynamic content to hundreds or thousands of people per second. Literally all you have to do for 90% of websites is not use some slow uncompiled backend that shits the bed at 50 RPS. Pointing this out pisses people off because they hate the idea that bogosort.js isn’t actually a good web backend and they might have to learn something else if they want to build a good website instead of trying to paper over perf issues with a massive reverse proxy with 35,000 config options and just as many CVEs.

capableweb 5y ago

That's a horrible idea. Yes, open source should definitely get off closed and abusive platforms like Reddit or AWS. Really, the open source community should start dog fooding more. It seems like yesterday all the communities were on IRC and it was easy to find everyone as long as you were connected to Freenode. Now everyone is using Slack, Discord or other closed-sourced systems that are not even built for the use case of "open by default". It's really sad to see, especially when a lot of developers in the ecosystem are cheering on projects moving to platforms like reddit or AWS. To run your own infrastructure is not as hard as you think, and it gets a lot cheaper too.

INTPenis 5y ago
I completely get where you're coming from, I'm a staunch self hoster myself. But why re-invent the wheel before you have to? That's just a waste of time and resources that could be used to promote and build your project. Like in this very case, the website is now down and unable to promote the project because it was made in a traditional way. Imho it's enough to retain ownership of domains to really own a project. Like the widelands.org domain. So whatever happens with AWS, or reddit, that domain can always move and point visitors to new communities. In my personal selfhosting environment I have my own domain pointed to protonmail. So even if protonmail goes belly up I can always move my domain somewhere else. And even my domain is picked to give me maximum control. I use my own country's ccTLD because they have a good conflict resolution department that will benefit me as a citizen.

mst 5y ago

The forum's a more complicated question but for the static information site for an open source project that's already hosting its code on github, configuring a custom domain for the github pages site would seem even simpler than sticking it on AWS.

wyager 5y ago

Even running a site that front-pages HN doesn’t actually require that much infrastructure. Peak traffic is a few hundred RPS. Or at least it was when I was still using google analytics. Might be more now. But in any case, if you use fast web software you can serve dynamic content to an HN ddos off a $5/mo VPS. The problem is a lot of people will be like “well my website doesn’t need to be fast because it’s not popular, so I’ll write it in python/node/ruby and make it dynamic” and then their server falls over at 50 RPS on commodity hardware, when if they’d written it with a popular haskell/rust/go/whatever framework, it could handle 100x that much traffic. If you hope that your writing ever reaches a large audience, you need to be able to serve a large audience! It doesn’t take that much extra work to be ready for it.

account42 5y ago
I think your getting downvoted because of the python/node/ruby vs. haskell/rust/go comment and perhaps rightly so. For some things this will certainly matter, but for a public content like this, especially the landing page, the real problem is that a flood of visitors should not all be hitting any dynamic backend in the first place - they are all going to see exactly the same page anyway. That means either making it completely static (would mean removing the sidebar in this case) or having a modest (micro-)caching setup so that most requests don't hit the backend. With nginx (which is what widelands.org seems to be using) this is only a couple of lines of configuration, no need to change the dynamic backend at all.
- wyager 5y ago
  Needing to use a reverse proxy like nginx in the first place is honestly insane, and the fact that many web devs tolerate it is a sign of totally whack priorities. You shouldn’t need a reverse proxy to serve your website, and you should be able to serve dynamic content to hundreds or thousands of people per second. Literally all you have to do for 90% of websites is not use some slow uncompiled backend that shits the bed at 50 RPS. Pointing this out pisses people off because they hate the idea that bogosort.js isn’t actually a good web backend and they might have to learn something else if they want to build a good website instead of trying to paper over perf issues with a massive reverse proxy with 35,000 config options and just as many CVEs.