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s3 + 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, bu
by jvanderbot 5mo ago
s3 + 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"