Comment by ForHackernews
3 months ago
Step 3 is the mistake. Don't allow anyone to put anything on your site. They can make their own site if they're that keen.
3 months ago
Step 3 is the mistake. Don't allow anyone to put anything on your site. They can make their own site if they're that keen.
Average person stops at this step because you generally need to use at least 2-3 services with separate accounts, logins, guides, and documentation (registrar, DNS/CDN, hosting, GitHub, various other dev tools) and to be prepared to spend some time reading technical documentation and guides, getting it all working together, just to have a website on the Internet that says something you made it say.
Once you start getting into analytics and development and payments and seo and hosts that aren’t just static sites, it’s just too much. There are some companies that try to hide it all behind products positioned towards non-technical website creators but really very few that do a good job at taking you from nothing to a full site. We’re about 2 weeks away from becoming one of those because I think it really isn’t as simple as saying “make your own site” now, even though it could be.
Ok, but what you're describing is a step (or several steps) beyond a personal website. For a personal website you only need a free hosting provider (like angelfire, geocities and co. of yestercentury) or a Wordpress hosting. No need to toy with registars, dns, cdns. Just a bit of html (heck, if you know what a url is you can just make webpages with Word), or not even that if you use a hosted blog engine.
The issue is you've just shifted the problems of the modern web to the free hosting provider. Now they have to filter out all the scams and spam. Fight against the DDOS attacks
>They can make their own site if they're that keen
Which curves back into discoverability. How is anyone going to find it? A search engine? They typically have to profit somehow, so they'll gladly link to a site with your same data that has ads on it first.
Site just for fun, we have that now. Either nobody knows they exist, or you suddenly find you're sticking it behind cloud flare to keep your traffic costs reasonable from the mass amount of junk hitting sites.
Nothing is solved, we are back to the original problem in the article.