3 ms·

+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, bu

+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. 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.