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Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical

by acabal 3y ago

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; this is a people problem and not a technical one. Likewise, another people problem is that it's not possible to accept money online without involving a 3rd party service like Fractured Atlas or Stripe or PayPal. (Moving away from GitHub towards a self-hosted Git solution, and away from Google Groups to a self-hosted mailing list, is actually on our long-term todo list[1]). All those things don't mean one can't run one's web app on a single tiny server, like we do. I still argue that outsourcing the basic fundamentals of one's web app, like the OS, runtime, or database to some cloud service, or resorting to flavor-of-the-month frameworks or containers, or doing silly things like using Javascript to render one's entire frontend, often simply result in complexity, slowness, and bloat. [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#main-website https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#...

jameshart 3y ago
Fully agree and endorse. But my point is... those are all web applications too, and they don't have the option of outsourcing everything. Someone has to build a system that does more than just serve static files. The claim that 'the majority of web applications can run on a single server' is kind of belied by the example of a site where not even the majority of sub-applications that are required to provide the full functionality of the system are running on a single server.
- acabal 3y ago
  Of course! Stripe, Paypal, Postmark/Sendgrid/whatever are not part of the majority I'm talking about. (Although Fractured Atlas, which is merely a wrapper for the Stripe API, is; we use it because it solves a people problem, not a technical one.) There are certainly projects and businesses that will require many high-power servers and more complex technical machinery than basic LAMP. However most people on HN are not developing the next Stripe, even if they don't realize it yet.

by acabal 3y ago

jameshart 3y ago

Fully agree and endorse. But my point is... those are all web applications too, and they don't have the option of outsourcing everything. Someone has to build a system that does more than just serve static files. The claim that 'the majority of web applications can run on a single server' is kind of belied by the example of a site where not even the majority of sub-applications that are required to provide the full functionality of the system are running on a single server.

acabal 3y ago
Of course! Stripe, Paypal, Postmark/Sendgrid/whatever are not part of the majority I'm talking about. (Although Fractured Atlas, which is merely a wrapper for the Stripe API, is; we use it because it solves a people problem, not a technical one.) There are certainly projects and businesses that will require many high-power servers and more complex technical machinery than basic LAMP. However most people on HN are not developing the next Stripe, even if they don't realize it yet.