http://neverssl.com/changes
> I also want to keep neverssl.com ad free, but as it's now costing me about $2,000 a year to host it, […]
Wait, how could hosting a static website cost $2k/year?!
> I also want to keep neverssl.com ad free, but as it's now costing me about $2,000 a year to host it, […]
Wait, how could hosting a static website cost $2k/year?!
Simple, probably a 386 computer plugged in somewhere. Never changed.
It is just a joke, the domain means "lost" in French and says "Lost on the internet? Don't panic! We are here to help you: * <- you are here"
Hasn't changed in 20 years, has no javascript, no tracker. Exist since before websites had ads everywhere, and know it would be laughable to put ads on it.
I have HTTPS Everywhere (Extension from EFF) configured to try to automatically upgrade to HTTPS. Works for a lot of websites that have TLS without defaulting to it.
NeverSSL actually does not have anything on port 443, so will work even if browsers start trying to upgrade people to HTTPS.
> it's just a simple website hosted on AWS
lots of ways of spending a lot of money on hosting a website on AWS. Hard to judge precisely without traffic numbers.
I'm continually stupefied by how willing so many HN commenters are to publically advertise their ignorance by giving useless advice to actual experts.
There is an assumption that if there's nothing really visible made by one person it means they don't know what they are talking about. So, background: I'm a linux sysadmin at a very large internet company, and has been running hobby and small business sites for 20 years parallel to this. About a decade ago I wrote cache plugins for WordPress and run a lot of tests of 128MB VPS machines to see when they break. The traffic from neverssl.com really should be fine on a Raspberry Pi 4, because the whole app, including the temporary redirect db needed would easily fit in memory. The OS can be read-only, so the SD card wouldn't wear out either, and the Pi 4 has a Gbit link. But as it's been pointed out, the internet uplink could indeed be a problem, so instead of that, there's Hetzner: 33€/m gets you unlimited traffic, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD. That's 400€/year, and that's all the cost. Note: Rpi4 has 1-4GB RAM.
Next time please consider that people may actually know what they are talking about even if they don't have their name attached to an "internet scale" service.
I've hosted more dynamic webpages with large amount of traffic on servers that were costing me 20$/month.
I'm pretty sure he knows what he's doing and it costs what it costs for a reason.
It's possible $166/mo is not enough of a hit on his income so as to be worth spending time optimizing (unlikely considering how little time it'd seemingly take to optimize), or since he works for AWS it could be sponsored (which would mean he has to justify the continued cost to his bosses when they ask about it).
All valid reasons, but not technical ones. Either there's some aspect of implementing this that we're not thinking of, or there are non-technical reasons involved that we're simply unaware of.
Thousands of people have built that for the past 20+ years without posting a link.
But seriously, someone could probably fork and then convert his existing GitHub repo into a GH page...
$0/year, forever.
This website can literally be hosted on a free tier at almost any major cloud provider.
If the page is 55KB, that means that a single GB is about 18K page loads, but let's make that 15K page loads due to various overhead.
To spend 2000$, you'd need to send about 22TB, which are about 330M page loads.
That equates to 330M/365d = ~900k loads per day.
> it's now grown to about 6 million hits per day, and that's just the traffic that makes it through to the landing page [0]
So he's paying a discount, even.