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Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting f
by not_kurt_godel 5mo ago
Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront.
- jvanderbot 5mo agos3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoYou can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.
- shric 5mo ago> want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets. You can put it behind cloudflare for free.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoYou can put the whole thing on CloudFlare Pages for free too. Zero reason to pay for or deal with the complexity of an unnecessary VPS.
- shric 5mo agoAgain “zero reason”. For some people it’s fun to have a VPS, that is a reason in and of itself.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoOf course literally anything can be 'reasonable' if you a priori like doing it independent of its technical/functional merits. My ex-coworker liked to write literally tens of thousands of lines of extra, completely unnecessary code for fun. That was a fine reason for him personally but didn't make it any less stupid to deal with for the rest of us.
- shric 5mo agoThe key here is “coworker”. He has an obligation to do reasonable things due to being employed by someone and it affecting others. This is completely different. When it’s a person blog and a personal VPS it’s affecting nobody but that person.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoAnd that's A-OK for them if that person likes more work with more headaches for a solution that costs more and performs worse. (Although less OK for everyone else when their VPS gets compromised and made part of a botnet or otherwise used for cybercrime.)
- vsgherzi 5mo agoThis is a blog.... you don't need some monster machine. You can server TONS of people off the smallest Digital Ocean instance. Many of these small VPSs can be had for less than a couple bucks a month. Tons of popular influencers run their own machines for their blog. insinuating that it's unsafe to run your own machine is insanity. I don't understand this mindset of being scared to run your own stuff. Especially if you're doing doing it at such a large scale there's nothing wrong with doing it with nginx and a linux box on a vps. You'll learn a hell of a lot more and be fine. At the end of the day it's a computer. We've been hosting websites since the 70's. With the advant of cloud compute is easier than every to run your own. (edited to be less mean)
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoWe have had something vastly better than an individual computer since idk, the mid 90s, called a CDN. I guess if you want to call being informed about the online threat landscape "scared", that's your perogative. For me, it's common sense to avoid completely unnecessary threat vectors to my digital infrastructure, but power to you if you like dealing with extra maintenance overhead and constantly wondering whether you're providing free cryptomining to some random international criminal.
- vsgherzi 5mo agoThere's threats on the internet, so don't spin up servers? Idk am I reading into that unfairly? That seems pretty fear mongering to me. Lots of engineering goes into making things safe for engineers to build on. Of course you can also just use squarespace and not worry about it at all. Perhaps my security posture is just not as intense as yours but I'm really just not super concerned my blog is going to get pwned. If it does then I get to learn some interesting things. I'm also not sure that I really need a CDN for a simple blog . I'm not going to benefit from the caching as it's not video or images.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoServers are work, including security overhead, so yes, don't spin them up if there is an alternative solution that is superior in every way except for not being able to churn digital butter.
- sgc 5mo agoOMG, not the once in a lifetime viral opportunity! You will never win this crusade, because there are too many people here who know from experience a VPS is neither expensive, nor under-performing up to millions of users a day, nor hard.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoThat's fine, it's not really a crusade. Just my opinion about the right infrastructure for the right use case informed by the objective reasons I gave. If doing more work with more headaches for a solution that costs more and performs worse is your jam, then power to you.
- grebc 5mo agoYou’ve written nothing objective.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoSure I have. Let me help you by recapping: 1. VPS costs more money. CDN is free for all intents and purposes. 2. VPS has worse availability even when run perfectly. 3. VPS requires more monitoring and maintenance. 4. VPS presents far greater security risk.
- grebc 5mo agoYou don’t need to recap your subjective experience, it’s on full display.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agou/grebc if money is subjective to you, then you're free to send me some as you objectively won't miss it.
- grebc 5mo agoSeems you have trouble reading too.
- qmr 5mo agoThis is a broken take for so many reasons. Also service monitoring is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoI listed my reasons, feel free to provide your own. I've done enough security, ops, and oncall professionally that I have zero desire to do extra in my free time. Power to you if want to do otherwise and/or post references to "deskilling" while advocating an outdated inefficient approach to long-solved problems.
- Mashimo 5mo agoWhy would a VPS choke hosting static HTML? For 5 EUR you get 20 TB traffic on Hetzner.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoYou tell me. Here's a list of maybe 15 sites it's happened to on HN in just the last month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=true&query=hug%20of%20death&sort=byDate&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...
- Mashimo 5mo agoI also know it happens. I still don't understand why.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoServers and/or their supporting infrastructure break in a million annoying ways when you throw a bunch of traffic at them. The top 2 culprits I've seen over the years are memory leaks and disks getting full from non-existent/failed log deletion/harvesting. 99.9% of those problems are effectively solved permanently and for free by using a CDN where applicable.
- jvanderbot 5mo agoYou're not wrong, but that doesn't make your argument immediately compelling. It is easy, but so is VPS. People use what they know, and switching cost requires a reason other than "this is also easy"
- vsgherzi 5mo agosome people (myself included) like hosting their own stack for fun or for learning. There's additional concern with tying your work to something like github it makes it more of a pain to pull it off and put it somewhere else. I'm not really sure what you mean by objectively inferior. It's trade offs like everything in this field. As far as harder, I don't really think the lift for a personal VPS is that high. Again it's a fun hobby project for most. It's fun to run your own stack. If you want to opt into the github cloudflare goodness that's fine they're good services but I wouldn't say it's better or degnegrate others for not doing that.
- MrDOS 5mo ago> for learning. That's great if that's what you want, but you are commenting in a thread full of people gleefully spouting off about decades-old installations that they self-admittedly have “no idea” how to upgrade. Most people in here would be better off if they admitted to themselves that they are not actually taking advantage of the opportunity to learn, and are instead undertaking a liability.
- pluralmonad 5mo agoIn this framing, learning is always a liability. The real issue is undertaking the liability while not capitalizing on the opportunity it presents.
- MrDOS 5mo agoThe “liability” I refer to is that of wilfully, knowingly leaving a system unpatched in order to avoid the learning opportunity of upgrading it. We're working toward the same goal here, yes.
- shric 5mo agoI don’t do it myself, but “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” is a bold claim. It might be harder, but we (geeks) love to do things ourselves. If someone is willing to use something like Hugo instead of garbage sites like Medium why not use a VPS? For many people working in tech $10/month and free are the same thing.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoPersonally I get my geek satisfaction from building systems that are rock-solid and require zero maintenance. Not choking on rare opportunities to go viral should they arise is a nice bonus too.
- shric 5mo agoPer a comment I made to one of your other replies in this thread, VPS doesn’t exclude this. You can put it behind cloudflare for free. And yes you can have preferences to keep things simple while others can make something unnecessarily complex. For personal projects this is fine and part of learning. If you had said “I much prefer… because…” it would have been fine but you said “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” which ignores people’s subjective preference for over engineering hobby stuff for learning.
- dizhn 5mo agoAnother option is cloudflare pages. Can be coupled with any hub or you can just push html artifacts.
- toast0 5mo agoI pay $35/month for a dedicated server for my nothing webpages. One the one hand, I could really host at home for $0/month extra. Or on a VPS for $5/month. I do need my own thing because I run a network testing tool that needs some amount of direct access. On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my situation. At least I'm sensible and don't have an actual colo space to visit. In the unlikely event I go viral, I'm pretty sure my server can manage serving https at 1gbps, and that's plenty. Maybe TLS is too much though, the cpus are too old for AESNI.
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoGood on ya. Personally I'm happier with my extra ~$6k, sparing of however many hours of pointless maintenance work over the years, and 100% uptime over past/present/future even if I go into a coma.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago> and 100% uptime over past/present/future On GitHub?!
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoS3+CloudFront. GitHub Page's mere 99.9999999% uptime is only for the weak-minded, of course.
- Gud 5mo agoYou are vastly overstating how much maintenance a FreeBSD box has.
- temp0826 5mo agoI did it this way for a long time, but it was mostly a learning/experimenting/fun thing back to have a "proper" server out there that I can run whatever service I wanted on (be it an irc bouncer or whatever). I'm a grownup now and don't have the time/care anymore and just run them out of s3/cloudflare (which was still "fun", but now I don't need to worry about the cve of the day. I don't mind contributing to the centralization of the internet when I'm paying $0/month for pages that nobody visits. Definitely happy to nerd out again if something ever warrants it).