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It sounds like you never really needed a VPS, that you could have just paid some shared hosting provider $10 a year to host your site and been fine, but instead

It sounds like you never really needed a VPS, that you could have just paid some shared hosting provider $10 a year to host your site and been fine, but instead you chose to do so and now somehow came to the realization that you never needed to do so. Cool story, but then you throw in a bunch of stuff like about how SaaS is hard to compete against but simply because you never had a reason for a VPS in the first place. Once you calculate things like bandwidth, then SaaS is not hard to compete against... so if you need to upload 20TB+ a month with a 10GB uplink, then certain VPS providers make perfect sense cause you'd end up paying 1000+k dollars per month to do the same through some cloud SaaS solution.

rstuart4133 5y ago
+1 The things he has moved to SaaS sounds like it's, simple, public low volume stuff. My only concern is what happens if the free provider just disappears, but reading between the lines it sounds he's got that covered. His web site is in git, he has a local copy of his git repositories and he backs it up to S3. Personally I've always used SaaS for stuff like that. Much harder is personal private stuff like email / contacts / calendar / photos. Stuff you want kept private, you don't want to loose ever and must be online 24/7. In utopia the back end would be redundant store with copies stored at multiple vendors, so you don't care if one dies. And the front end is yet another SaaS provider that uses the back ends. If they disappear you just move to another one, pointing them to your back ends. In the real world you use Google or a competitor to do all jobs, they make it hard to export / import your data to other providers, they mine your data, they will make it available to governments and law enforcement agencies and possibly lawyers on request without telling you, and if they get the shits with you it disappears and you loose everything. In todays world that what SaaS delivers to most people, and it's reads like a deal with the devil.
- jaza 5y ago
  Author here. That's right, I'd like to think I do have it pretty well covered, if the free provider just disappears. They're static sites, they can be hosted anywhere. I have almost no lock-in (except for a few config files, and function hooks, that could be ported fairly easily). If one provider pulls the rug out from under me, I can move to another one. In the worst case scenario, if all the providers stop offering free static hosting, I could just move all my www hosting back to a VPS (although I'd probably move it to S3 + CloudFront + Lambda, which isn't free, but is so cheap for low-volume that it might as well be free). Yes, I agree, personal private stuff is harder. Before embarking on this static-site endeavour, I migrated my photos from Flickr to S3 / CloudFront, and that was a big project in itself (and Flickr is one of the nicer SaaS'es, that lets you export your data quite easily). For email / contacts / calendar, I'm pretty locked in (with one of the big providers), I wouldn't mind moving to a better setup where I own and I control the data, but honestly, it's in my too hard basket.
jaza 5y ago
Author here. I never needed a VPS for the bandwidth. But I did need it for dynamic www hosting (mainly powered by Gunicorn + PostgreSQL). SaaS / PaaS alternatives (e.g. Heroku - which I've used occasionally), or IaaS alternatives (e.g. in Amazon land, RDS / ECS / S3), in that space, are generally more expensive. Now that my sites are "static" (the inverted commas are because there's still actually dynamic functionality, powered by serverless functions), I can host them on a number of different SaaS / PaaS providers, that have fairly generous free plans.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  And that is understandable. I have my site hosted on GitLab Pages for free and love that it is fast and feels dynamic even though it is static. However, I also have some other stuff that takes up quite a bit of storage that would only work on a VPS or dedicated server, but in pricing it out with cloud providers it was like 100x the cost.
ipaddr 5y ago
hostgator would have given him a reseller account for 8 dollars or 4 for just an account. No admin needed.

rstuart4133 5y ago

+1 The things he has moved to SaaS sounds like it's, simple, public low volume stuff. My only concern is what happens if the free provider just disappears, but reading between the lines it sounds he's got that covered. His web site is in git, he has a local copy of his git repositories and he backs it up to S3. Personally I've always used SaaS for stuff like that. Much harder is personal private stuff like email / contacts / calendar / photos. Stuff you want kept private, you don't want to loose ever and must be online 24/7. In utopia the back end would be redundant store with copies stored at multiple vendors, so you don't care if one dies. And the front end is yet another SaaS provider that uses the back ends. If they disappear you just move to another one, pointing them to your back ends. In the real world you use Google or a competitor to do all jobs, they make it hard to export / import your data to other providers, they mine your data, they will make it available to governments and law enforcement agencies and possibly lawyers on request without telling you, and if they get the shits with you it disappears and you loose everything. In todays world that what SaaS delivers to most people, and it's reads like a deal with the devil.

jaza 5y ago
Author here. That's right, I'd like to think I do have it pretty well covered, if the free provider just disappears. They're static sites, they can be hosted anywhere. I have almost no lock-in (except for a few config files, and function hooks, that could be ported fairly easily). If one provider pulls the rug out from under me, I can move to another one. In the worst case scenario, if all the providers stop offering free static hosting, I could just move all my www hosting back to a VPS (although I'd probably move it to S3 + CloudFront + Lambda, which isn't free, but is so cheap for low-volume that it might as well be free). Yes, I agree, personal private stuff is harder. Before embarking on this static-site endeavour, I migrated my photos from Flickr to S3 / CloudFront, and that was a big project in itself (and Flickr is one of the nicer SaaS'es, that lets you export your data quite easily). For email / contacts / calendar, I'm pretty locked in (with one of the big providers), I wouldn't mind moving to a better setup where I own and I control the data, but honestly, it's in my too hard basket.

jaza 5y ago

Author here. I never needed a VPS for the bandwidth. But I did need it for dynamic www hosting (mainly powered by Gunicorn + PostgreSQL). SaaS / PaaS alternatives (e.g. Heroku - which I've used occasionally), or IaaS alternatives (e.g. in Amazon land, RDS / ECS / S3), in that space, are generally more expensive. Now that my sites are "static" (the inverted commas are because there's still actually dynamic functionality, powered by serverless functions), I can host them on a number of different SaaS / PaaS providers, that have fairly generous free plans.

encryptluks2 5y ago
And that is understandable. I have my site hosted on GitLab Pages for free and love that it is fast and feels dynamic even though it is static. However, I also have some other stuff that takes up quite a bit of storage that would only work on a VPS or dedicated server, but in pricing it out with cloud providers it was like 100x the cost.

ipaddr 5y ago

hostgator would have given him a reseller account for 8 dollars or 4 for just an account. No admin needed.