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It's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capa

by eli 4y ago

It's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capable. There are free services like Wix and Glitch that let you build a webpage and then mess with the HTML, no domain name needed. The problem of warez is certainly no worse than it was 30 years ago, and there are much better tools to address it. A simple storage quota probably goes a long way.

sph 4y ago
Signing up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work. It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  Thank goodness you don't need to do any of that then. If all you want is to host static html, then any free hosting service will suffice. I.e. let them create a GitHub account and show them git add / git commit / git push and you're done.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    If you can use git, you can run a webserver. It's all just right there waiting for you.
- eli 4y ago
  That's because someone did the work of setting up a server for you, configuring the services, and issuing FTP credentials. That part is now a whole lot cheaper and easier and more secure. It doesn't get much easier than signing up for e.g. Glitch.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Setting up a server is so unbelievably simple that anyone capable of writing software shouldn't blink at the task. The fact that there's a lot of blinking strikes me as profoundly funny.
    - WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
      I mean, it isn't? Even the simple matter of port forwarding assumes you have access to the router you're using, and that's a major barrier for a lot of people. I run the programming club at my high school (I'm a high schooler), and we use Github pages to host all of our stuff for this very reason. I've used some old laptops to run servers within the network, but my school doesn't want us hosting anything public, and running everything through a free tunneling service like localtunnel is possible, but it scales so much better when students can just follow some friendly instructions to host a static site themselves. It's not hard for the people with the privileges of (1) having a budget > $0 and (2) not having the adults tell you 'no' every time you want to try learn something. Am I missing something? Even hosting static content on a server seems like a layer of complexity that is frequently unnecessary for basic use-cases.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        You just, as you say, follow friendly instructions. It's as easy as reading a page of a manual.
    - eli 4y ago
      In 1999? I mean, I did it, but I didn't think it was easy. Every single step was harder then than it is now.

by eli 4y ago

sph 4y ago

Signing up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work. It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.

411111111111111 4y ago
Thank goodness you don't need to do any of that then. If all you want is to host static html, then any free hosting service will suffice. I.e. let them create a GitHub account and show them git add / git commit / git push and you're done.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  If you can use git, you can run a webserver. It's all just right there waiting for you.
eli 4y ago
That's because someone did the work of setting up a server for you, configuring the services, and issuing FTP credentials. That part is now a whole lot cheaper and easier and more secure. It doesn't get much easier than signing up for e.g. Glitch.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  Setting up a server is so unbelievably simple that anyone capable of writing software shouldn't blink at the task. The fact that there's a lot of blinking strikes me as profoundly funny.
  - WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
    I mean, it isn't? Even the simple matter of port forwarding assumes you have access to the router you're using, and that's a major barrier for a lot of people. I run the programming club at my high school (I'm a high schooler), and we use Github pages to host all of our stuff for this very reason. I've used some old laptops to run servers within the network, but my school doesn't want us hosting anything public, and running everything through a free tunneling service like localtunnel is possible, but it scales so much better when students can just follow some friendly instructions to host a static site themselves. It's not hard for the people with the privileges of (1) having a budget > $0 and (2) not having the adults tell you 'no' every time you want to try learn something. Am I missing something? Even hosting static content on a server seems like a layer of complexity that is frequently unnecessary for basic use-cases.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      You just, as you say, follow friendly instructions. It's as easy as reading a page of a manual.
  - eli 4y ago
    In 1999? I mean, I did it, but I didn't think it was easy. Every single step was harder then than it is now.