Comment by jitl 10 hours ago
Really? If I’m an unsophisticated blog not using a CDN, and I get a $1000 bill for bandwidth overage or something, I’m gonna google a solve and slap it on there because I don’t want to pay another $1000 for Big Basilisk. I don’t think that’s emotional response, it’s common sense.
>Flat rate web hosting exists, and blogs (especially unsophisticated ones) do not require much bandwidth or processing power.
I actually find this surprisingly difficult to find.
I just want static hosting (like Netlify or Firebase Hosting), but there aren't many hosts that offer that.
There are lots of providers where I can buy a VPS somewhere and be in charge of configuring and patching it, but if I just want to hand someone a set of HTML files and some money in exchange for hosting, not many hosts fit the bill.
> There are lots of providers where I can buy a VPS somewhere and be in charge of configuring and patching it, but if I just want to hand someone a set of HTML files and some money in exchange for hosting, not many hosts fit the bill.
Yeah, that's true, there isn't a lot of "I give you money and HTML, you host it" services out there, surprisingly. Probably the most mature, cheapest and most reliable one today would be good ol' neocities.org (run by HN user kyledrake) which basically gives you 3TB/month for $5, pretty good deal :)
Sometimes when I miss StumbleUpon I go to https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random which gives a fun little glimpse of the hobby/curiosity/creative web.
You already had a couple of suggestions but I've been happy in the past with OVH.
If you just want to host HTML for personal use github pages is free (and works with a custom domain). There are bandwidth limitations, but they definitely won't pull an AWS on you and send a bill that would cover a new car because a crawler acted up.
Interesting, I was under the impression this was more common than maybe it is. I know the hosting market has gotten pretty bad.
So, I'm currently building pretty much this. After doing it on the side for clients for years, it's now my full-time effort. I have a solid and stable infrastructure, but not yet an API or web frontend. If somebody wants basically ssh, git, and static (or even not static!) hosting that comes with a sysadmin's contact information for a small number of dollars per month, I can be reached at sysop@biphrost.net.
Environment is currently Debian-in-LXC-on-Debian-on-DigitalOcean.
> There are lots of providers where I can buy a VPS somewhere and be in charge of configuring and patching it, but if I just want to hand someone a set of HTML files and some money in exchange for hosting, not many hosts fit the bill.
Dreamhost! They're still around and still lovely after how many years? I even find their custom control panel charming.
Wouldn't it be easier to put the unsophisticated blog behind cloudflare
Seems like you've made profoundly questionable hosting or design choices for that to happen. Flat rate web hosting exists, and blogs (especially unsophisticated ones) do not require much bandwidth or processing power.
Misbehaving crawlers are a huge problem but bloggers are among the least affected by them. Something like a wiki or a forum is a better example, as they're in a category of websites where each page visit is almost unavoidably rendered on the fly using multiple expensive SQL queries due to the rapidly mutating nature of their datasets.
Git forges, like the one TFA is discussing, are also fairly expensive, especially as crawlers traverse historical states. When the crawler is poorly implemented they'll get stuck doing this basically forever. Detecting and dealing with git hosts is an absolute must for any web crawler due to this.