Comment by not_kurt_godel
1 day 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.
1 day 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.
I 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).
I 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.
Personally 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.
Per 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.
I 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.
Good 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.
> and 100% uptime over past/present/future
On GitHub?!
1 reply →
You are vastly overstating how much maintenance a FreeBSD box has.
some 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.
> 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.
In this framing, learning is always a liability. The real issue is undertaking the liability while not capitalizing on the opportunity it presents.
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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, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.
You 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.
OMG, 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.
6 replies →
You'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"
Why would a VPS choke hosting static HTML?
For 5 EUR you get 20 TB traffic on Hetzner.
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This is a broken take for so many reasons. Also service monitoring is a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
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> 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.
5 replies →
This 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)
12 replies →
Another option is cloudflare pages. Can be coupled with any hub or you can just push html artifacts.