Show HN: 1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database
1mb.site
1mb.site
I would have given my left ear to have a similar service growing up. There were a billion "free hosting" sites that let you throw PHP scripts up on them, and "free mysql" hosts that let you have a couple of free tables of X rows, which give a 12yo an incredible head start when it came to web-dev. The downside is that those sites were trying to push scuzzy gambling sites or were soft targets for hackers. This feels like a clean, modern reincarnation of that!
No, this isn't posterous where your creations will live forever, this is a little playground for those who don't know how to or rather not configure a VPS for a little toy they've made.
Great job!
(EDIT: Shout-out to 2008's T35.com and CJB.net and their free php hosting and short sub-domains https://web.archive.org/web/20080617010556/http://www.t35.co... , https://web.archive.org/web/20080408210303/http://www.cjb.ne...)
Like, it's OK that you didn't, but maybe you should check that your entire public API (all microservices, UI, etc) will really be secure.
You will probably struggle to get a secure interface while user content is served from the same domain as your UI.
I think the interaction in this forum thread says a lot about my focus on security. An issue was reported and I jumped on it immediately. I’m not going to sit here and claim to be perfect, but I am going to tell you that I work really hard to make sure I do stuff right and fix my mistakes ASAP. I have had white hat hackers review my API by the way and have patched reported security vulnerabilities.
See github.com vs github.io[1], amazon.com vs. elasticbeanstalk.com, azure.com vs azurewebsites.net, etc... Every major company I know of that hosts arbitrary user content dedicates a TLD to it that's not shared by the management APIs.
[1] https://github.blog/2013-04-05-new-github-pages-domain-githu...
Really? In my experience not many people care about logout CSRF, it's the lowest of low risk vulns that infosec consultants write in a report when they don't have any real vulnerabilities. I'm not sure its presence really says much about the site overall.
Effort is much better spent elsewhere - strict Content-Security-Policy, for example. Or, if there are 'real' CSRF vulns that actually do damage
I can assure you that the opposite is true. Tumblr deleted half their content. MySpace lost all their content. GeoCities lost everything. Facebook "accidentally" lost Zuckerberg's old posts and with all the money and software "engineers" in the world can't recover them. Startups and corporations that had the kind of money and technical expertise you could only dream of can't keep data forever. Don't get carried away and make promises there is no way you can keep.
EDIT: I see you've redefined forever in the fine print:
> 1MB is not a big company. This is a project funded, developed, and maintained by an individual. By subscribing to Pro you are helping keep this project online for years to come.
> (1) Forever or for the life of the project. 1MB isn't going anywhere, but we also can't predict the future. No refunds!
Small nitpick, but Yahoo deleted everything. Let's not forget how poorly run Yahoo is.
[0] For example,archive storage at OVH runs at 0.0026$ per GB, so having a backup of 4 million 1mb sites would cost 1.04$/month for three copies of data.
Edit: it looks like these carcas pits are all calling themselves graves now ;-)
Edit; we also made custom scanners for porn and phishing; especially phishing, at that time had a simply pattern; the phishing page(s) would have keywords in them and would not be linked anywhere on the domain while not being the index.html. That allowed us to move almost all of them automatically.
I wasted so much time on that gosh darn site...
I'd change the headline to "1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database".
That database is the edge you have compared to Netlify and Github pages people are asking for :)
The authentication part is a nice touch, too. Feels more like a community thing.
Checked out the API and you even have easy to setup database permissions. I like it.
-
Questions: do you plan to offer paid plans for people wishing to host more than 1MB, or having paid support? Maybe paid private login workspaces and SSO could be a paid feature too.
Also the "no one can predict the future" is a bit scary so another thing is to promise you can get your data out as a static site for netlify, github etc. at any time.
By the way your offering fills a certain niche that I am interested in. That is the niche where a technical person like myself wants to design a site using HTML & CSS in text editor (how else would you do it!) but there is another nontechnical person who wants a nicer editor to edit the content. In addition I want a fast and cheap CDN type of offering. Netlify is what I use now, but it means I have to make the wording changes which sucks.
I imagine this is a common situation for small time website developers. For example if I make a site for the local pizza delivery, they might need to change their menu, but it is good if they can do it directly. But I like to host it as a static site so I know it is less likely to get hacked or be slow, and I can back it up more easily (looking at you Wordpress+MySQL+Bunch of PHP files called plugins).
To do that, I guess, 1mb or similar businesses could add capability to create a website, post to it, update it via something as ubiquitous as WhatsApp, kind of like a Tumblr or posterous clone; add ability to accept payments, sell things.
Curiously, among my friends, telegram is used to consume content. They subscribe to telegram-channels and simply search for content posted and browse it right from the app. Much like how YouTube has replaced games, and Instagram has replaced Facebook, telegram in a sense has replaced Google/Browser.
Perhaps, someone needs to invent a new kind of web that is in symbiosis with WhatsApp or these other very popular apps. I guess that is exactly what Meesho [0] is doing, but not quite? May be some business like 1mb will figure it all out.
[0]: https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...
1. Why a custom JS-based CLI tool for deployment? What does it do? Why not something like plain SSH?
2. What is the plan for this? Presumably you'll want to monetize the project? Will you ever add ads to my sites? Or will you offer premium features?
3. What's the reason for the NoSQL DB?
4. Your CLI tool only allows .png files as images. Is there a reason you don't allow any other types?
5. Is there a limit on the number of sites you can have or the storage you can use?
Were u allowed to withdraw your balance? What r u switching too?
You can totally have a secure sftp endpoint on your filehost.
Have browser, will content.
1) This doesn't seem to be connected to any major company, so how are you going to handle abuse of the service? With 'free hosting' offerings like this often comes a wave of abuse and malicious actors, so dealing with them is going to take significant resources.
2) How are you planning to monetize the service? Even though most sites hosted wont exceed a few kb, hosting fees will quickly add up, and unless you are using a cheap bare metal server you will likely face significant monthly bills.
These concerns aside, the service looks really awesome for most personal blog use cases, so congratulations to a successful launch!
https://startupstash.com/paypal-alternatives/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771573
Just dig into each that might fit your situation looking for people's props and gripes about them. Edited to add the HN link since commenters mentioned other services.
There's probably other scenarios people can think of.
Good luck!
For years now I've been hoping that one day the wheel of internet trends will roll back around and make personally-designed webpages a thing again instead of this bland "social media" landscape.
Definitely bookmarking this so that I can come back to it and see what I can build once I have time.
A small comment: In the 'Edit Site' page, the preview is reloading with every keystroke. Would it be better to make it refresh on the click of a button?
Quick note:
Google sites requires 2 nameservers and because of that I am not able to point the site to my domain.
Side note, your footer on mobile is missing some items unless you release you can swipe across - which is not obvious.
Let's say that given your service is free and with custom domain, a journalist uses it to publish 100k worth of revealing docs in whistlerblower.com. Then a government acts and directs a DDOs to it. What will happen to that site? To other sites?
Especially when a service is free, I want to know a little about who I’m getting involved with.
Edit: what’s the deal with the downvotes? It’s entirely reasonable to ask who is behind a service.
1. please dont have "forever" pricing. i would rather pay a higher fee monthly.
2. please have tiers according to size and bandwidth requirements
3. Instead of creating your own cli, etc. Could you integrate with Gatsbyjs ? In fact, your killer feature could be a wysiwyg editor for Gatsby
I would strongly prefer an open standard like Graphql over a custom nosql you have. You can implement it at your end using something like https://hasura.io/ or something.
this is killer if it happens. You are basically netlify+gatsbyjs+contentful rolled into one. I could never figure out why netlify and contentful dont support the features of the other.
Well, I would disagree. Forever pricing would be awesome.
GET requests never affecting state is backend web dev 101.
I like it. Some people have expressed concerns about yet another platform which holds your data. I don't actually have a problem with that as long as you can leave without being penalized. A good way to alleviate those concerns might be a feature where you could download all of your site data along with a guide to setting it up self hosted.
somewhat better with Chromium but weird nonetheless: http://i.imgur.com/1IbVXEQ.png
Also are the sites supposed to look that big? https://i.imgur.com/QIRNATC.jpg (sorry for shitty photo quality, my phone is ancient... i took a photo instead of a screenshot to show how big it looks physically)
The UI looks a bit too big on my monitor, but other than that it is nice for small stuff. I think it needs some way to upload multiple files from the browser via upload dialog and/or dragdrop (like imgur does, for example).
Also i found the editor autocompleting the closing tag very annoying! Also a bit annoying was the "smart" autoindentation (autoindent is fine of course, but trying to be smart clashes with how i'd indent things).
Anyway, good luck with it :-).
Basically adding some dynamic content to a otherwise static site that the user(s) can change themselves.
The 1mb site would be an admin interface for changing the content in the DB, the 1mb DB serving the content to the front-end hosted elsewhere.
I'll have to try this out. Very cool.
With permissions, enforced fields, and the ability to get the logged in 1MB username you can easily create a dynamic application. Check out chat.1mb.site and forum.1mb.site which are both applications that utilize a 1MB database.
Click here to read the API documentation.” looks like inspect element lol
The only question is: how long will you be able to run this? There have been so many free webhosts that shut down over night, my confidence in any hosting project is limited
I do wish for you to succeed, so I'll keep my fingers crossed! ;-)
Also, you said the magic words...
What are the magic words? Are they "Abracadabra", "Alakazam" or "Open Sesame" perhaps?
No.
The magic words are: "Passion Project".
In any marketplace, there are 800lb Gorillas, medium players, and "Passion Projects".
I tend to root for the "Passion Project", having several of my own.
I mean, this is America, right, many of us root for the underdog, right?
Good luck with your "Passion Project"! May it grow and grow! (Also, realize that as it does, it will attract more and more criticism -> criticism = barometer of fame and indicator of success, that's criticism's secret identity, just so you know in advance! <g>)
Having that built in DB is a killer feature to me.
Does the DB prevent hackers from overwriting keys?
Though I'll admit I was confused as well until I saw the twitter handle.
Looks good.
Git integration is like Heroku. The user types `git push 1mbsite master` and 1mbsite would publish it.
OP: This is cool. It's not meant to replace Netlify or GH Pages or a million other things, and I understand that. Some people just want to make something and you made something. You've done more than so many people here by just releasing something and that's something to take great pride in. I don't have a use for it personally, but I think it's really cool and I took a look at the code to see what was going on. I found it neat.
Ignore and excuse everyone that's expecting a multi-million dollar product from you.
Everyone else: If you're genuinely asking "what's the point of this?" or "why's it free? who are you? why should I trust you?" or "what does this do that Netlify or GH Pages doesn't" — let's get real for a minute: Not everything is meant to compete with these services, or any service. There are a hundred-thousand products that exist on the internet with very happy users that you and I have never heard of. This bias that everything needs to be "the one" that we all use is discouraging, isn't the goal of this community, and isn't in the hacker spirit. It's fine to be skeptical and curious, but don't be a downer or shame.
This is show and tell: Timmy brought a rock he thinks is cool, Cassie brought her mom's diamonds, and Shaun brought a 2Pac album. Don't yuck other people's yums.
While I have you: What itch lead you to build this? What did you draw inspiration from?
That’s as good a reason as any. Similar reasons to that are why there have been some large changes in the way people use computers at all.
Nice work and good luck
If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.
Uh... Down maybe. Up... We're not quite there yet. Rural America (sometimes just a few miles outside a major city) can have <5meg down and under 0.5meg up. During non-peak hours that is.
This reads as condemning someone because of the actions of others. Like if I said to you: If I hire you, you'll just steal my source code like Levandowski did when he was at Google.
I don't think anyone would appreciate the second statement.. but you seem eager to condemn the motivations of this project without learning a single thing about the founder and his ethics or motivations.
Everyone saying that 100KB/s upload isn't enough to host a static site that is under <1MB in size is either ignorant or intentionally disingenuous. I was hosting my static site from home on far less than that for a decade.
Hardly. 2 megabytes/s download, around 120 kilobytes/s upload - my upload speed barely even reaches one megabit.
And it's from a dynamic IP, and connectivity drops off randomly once a month.
Could I host a static site on my own computer, with a little fiddling? Sure. Even a dynamic one. And it would be slow as molasses, and it would probably get denial'o'service-d if getting ten visitors at the same time.
And so what if your websites goes offline for a few hours a handful of times a year? Or even a week. It doesn't matter. This isn't some profit driven job.
This is called switching cost and it's a challenge for any new business in an established market.
Consumers ask themselves this question constantly and it's something you need to be prepared to answer if you want people to use your service instead of X.
I'm currently using Netlify for free static hosting. How is 1MB any better than Netlify?
The comments here all look quite reasonable & polite. Maybe I am missing something? I can’t see any comment that warrants you to have posted this here (though, again, I agree with all your points).
One of the main reasons I show up here is to see what others are charing. That said, those doing Show HN should probably scan some other Show HN's to get a sense of what people are looking for.
- What is it? High level. - Why should I care? That is, what's in it for me. - Along the same lines, benefits (not features) - What is it? Deeper, the technology behind it. - What makes it different (and perhaps better)? - If it free, assure me (or not) I'm not the product. - Along the same lines, be upfront about what you might do - or not - with any data using the product might provide. - Why? Why did you do this? There's a difference between launching some cookie cutter product and a side project for learning / exploring.
When I get around to it, I'm going to do a proper blog post on this list.
"The bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
- Anton Ego (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ratatouille)
Regarding 1MB: looks like a good idea for teaching people how to get a simple website on the web. Like many here, I grew up in the age of Geocities and similar services.
I'm happy to have high quality services like Netlify available for me, but we need more indie services to serve as entry points for newcomers. Netlify and co. may change; we're already centralizing development workflows too much (e.g. GitHub).
More power to small creators using their resources to open up spaces for other creators.
The existence of another sandwich shop, even a successful and tasty one, doesn't mean I can't open up one of my own - or that my sandwiches need be exposed to constant criticism for lacking some arbitrary ingredient such as, say, tarragon or sage. Not all websites need to offer the digital equivalent of say beansprouts with hollandaise spread even if you really like that (it sounds magnificent tbh).
Nor do they need a new spin on sandwiches or a new innovation in sandwichcraft. All they need is to execute well: offer fair prices, quality service, and use decent ingredients. That's quite enough. It's not the French Laundry, ok fine, who cares?
We are at a point of tech where people are opening up internet sandwich shops. That's fine. A well executed me-too nothing-new thing is totally absolutely fine. The internet is big enough for all of us. Have a good time and enjoy building stuff.
A ton. It's more than enough.
What can one do with 140 character limits?
Is making the front page of HN and doing 50gb in one day "abuse"?
But if you're hitting the frontpage twice a month, probably time to pay for a plan.