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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

It's easier than ever to built the web of 20+ years ago. Running a VPS with PHP where you had to patch the server and worry about hackers and malware has always been a concern, this is nothing new. But on today's web you can get around all of that with PaaS solutions like Heroku. $7/mo and you can host your custom site all you want without worrying about security or infrastructure.

A domain being seized by law enforcement for hosting illegal content (even if it was put there by hackers) is nothing new and has nothing to do with the state of the modern web.

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It is not easier. If you don't host your website behind cloudflare it can be easily ddosed.

The only way to get good ddos protection is to centralize because it requires you to have close personal relationships across the world in order to get good bandwidth at every location.

You could be. But you won't be. Getting denial of serviced on the web running a personal site is like getting attacked by terrorism. Sure, it happens, but it only ever directly effects the lives of less than half of a percent of people even with the most generous definitions of "terrorism". It's the reactions to it that cause damage.

And it's the same reactions to it on the internet that hurt and not the DoSes. Just run your website. If it gets DoS'd no big deal. It's not like you even need a single nine of uptime consistency.

I've run my for 20 years from my home connection, I've been a jerk on IRC, I've used it for gaming clans, I've hosted and continue to host tor onion services. I have never been DoS'd.

At all my past jobs we've been hit with DDOS (either directly or indirectly via our customers). If the odds are like terrorism I must work at firms with the world's unluckiest businesses.

Sounds like you are involving money. Don't do that.

Plenty of non-profits have been ddosed. Your website is either small or is just lucky to have an audience that isn't inclined to ddos.

Yes. Like most websites.

The threshold for "small" is a lot smaller than it was in 2000.

There are a lot of people in this thread who have very valid complaints about the web, but don't make any sense at all in context. This one is a great example. Sure DDoS sucks but what at all does that have to do with the difference between today's web and the web of the 2000s? Today's web offers DDoS protection (optionally) and the web of the 2000s did not.

The first DDoS happened in 1996. Absolutely nothing to do with the current topic at hand, completely off topic.

It is way easier to ddos a website today than back in the 2000s. Back in 2000, you could block almost every ddos simply by having gigabit. Now there are millions of more exploitable devices.

Do a search, https://www.google.com/search?q=stresser

An attack that can cripple all but the largest networks can be had for $5-10.

I always take those speeds with a grain of salt as it is likely that they dont actually provide those speeds. What is someone gonna do if the speeds are wrong? Sue them in court for not commited the crime they are paying to commit enough?

Or to massively decentralize so that you need to bring down the entire network.

A web hosted in the hands of a few is exactly the problem leading to the problem here.

Centralization is the issue. May it be registries, ISPs, hosting providers or anything else. Heroku and PaaS do not solve this at all.

Was the Web of the 2000s really based on completely decentralized ISPs, registries, and hosting providers? I was there and I seem to remember there being a small number of ISPs, a small number of registrars, and a small number of hosting providers. A site like this would be registered at GoDaddy and hosted at DreamHost.

Of course many people could fill out the ICANN paperwork themselves and run a server from their own home, but many people can do that now too. And if you do that, you still run into the issue of hackers being able to install malware on your systems. But instead of the police seizing your domain, they kick in your door in the middle of the night with guns pointed at your family.

Maybe it would clear things up if you could lay out for me the exact scenario that combines "the web of the 2000s is rapidly disappearing" with "registrar, ISP, and hosting provider centralization is the issue" and ends with "if that wasn't the case, this website would never have had to shut down". I feel like you're remembering the web of the 2000s very VERY differently than I am.

In the early 2000s there were probably 10-20 national dialup services, plus tons of local services (it was an easy business to get into, either get a t1 for upstream internet and a t1 for your modem pool, or run a radius server and contract out through megapath), dsl had competition with clecs running in the central office and mandatory line sharing, and these were also in competition with cable (which had some minimal line sharing in areas).

There were a ton of hosts back then, but there still are. I don't remember exactly when registrars became a concept, i'd guess that might have been 1999 though; I don't think there's that many more or less now. A lot more registries with .ninja and .bike and whatever.

I agree though, if law enforcement wanted your domain back then, it would be about the same as now. Although, maybe someone would have called/emailed you about it with whois contacts back then.

Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, HughesNet, Exede, CenturyLink, Frontier, Cricket, MediaCom, Cox, Sprint, Windstream, T-Mobile, WOW, Dish Network, Cable ONE, Suddenlink, US Cellular, Google Fiber...

Actually it might just be easier to link to the Wikipedia article about ISPs serving the US because there are a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...

Sorry, one of my pet peeves is when people say "the Web of [insert time here] is dead!" when the Web has never been more accessible both from a consumer standpoint and from a developer standpoint. The existence of Facebook and Google can be completely ignored if you actually want to. Emphasis on if you actually want to.

That's a big list, but often, you only have 1 or 2 of those options available to you.

85% of Americans live in urban areas where they would have at least the choice of one cable provider (Comcast, Charter), one DSL provider (AT&T), all of the satellite providers (HugesNet), and at least the big four cell phone providers. Not to mention local dial-up providers which do still exist.

Again, it all comes back to the idea of some people "wish" the web of the 2000s still existed, but aren't willing to sacrifice the comforts of the 2010's web to make it happen. You can host your own lightweight website but Wordpress and Facebook is easier. You can search the web without tracking and Javascript but the modern websites don't work without it. You can pick from a huge variety of ISPs but they won't all be at 100 Mbps. Basically, you can have the web of the 2000s, but it comes at the cost of some of the conveniences of the 2010s web. A lot of people aren't willing to make that trade.

Nostalgia is hard. It seemed amazing back then but not many people would choose to go back to dial-up and phpMyAdmin. For those who say they would... what's stopping you? It all still exists today.

You should probably also be worried about VPS seizure by the hosting provider.

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