Comment by marginalia_nu

Comment by marginalia_nu 9 hours ago

7 replies

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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.

mtlynch 8 hours ago

>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.

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  • diggan 8 hours ago

    > 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.

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  • marginalia_nu 8 hours ago

    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.

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  • thaumaturgy 7 hours ago

    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.

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  • ctoth 8 hours ago

    > 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.

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    • hobs 7 hours ago

      I really like DH(though I am still mad about the cloudatcost shenanigans) and use them but if you use 200x the resources the other shared sites consume you're getting the boot just like anyone.

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