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Comment by jhatemyjob | Hacker News Reader

If you want your services to be in control of you, self-host everything. That way all of your weekends and nights are for updating to FreeBSD 14 and debugging why postgres can't write to disk anymore oh wait I need to buy more storage and migrate everything

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I don't agree. There are a lot of services which provide fully managed platforms with multiple competent providers you can migrate between. WordPress + CPanel does a great job at this, I've seen barely technical folks manage multiple websites and blogs,export and restore backups, migrate between providers. And this was all 10years back.

> And this was all 10years back.

Thankfully, we've tossed all that old stuff out and simplified things with Docker and k8s.

Gonna suck for a while yes but long run there are real reasons for this jump from little daemons installed on to hosts to cloud native.

"simplified" things with Docker and k8s.. if you are using docker for anything other than microservices and development environments you are doing it wrong.

Containerd then? Containers predate docker in the form of VMs, the only difference being optimizations with not having to run another entire OS kernel to get software running in the exact same state on many machines in just a few seconds.

Containers are substantially different to VMs, but in practice I see them as equivalent technologically and operationally for my home lab/self-hosting use cases (sans weaker security guarantees, but that I can live with).

They are a simplification in practice, because I can toss everything into a bunch of Pis that stay on 24/7 rather than worry about the power use (and the power bills) that would come with using a more fully-featured rack server/old PC that has enough RAM to deal with multiple VMs.

I sure hope you are joking. Not sure though. Other commenters seem to take you serious, too. Please clarify. :-D

FreeNAS supports docker, so arguably, clicking download on some panel somewhere to get a working locally hosted [wordpress, game server, ...] is simplified.

You can always pay for managed versions of these services if you want the piece of mind. NextCloud and email providers come to mind.

Other than that, Docker has simplified things a lot in the self-hosting space. It's not quite as plug-and-play as Lego bricks yet, but it's made experimentation and sustainable self-hosting much easier as long as you're running on a supported platform. It's much easier to version the environment, much easier to keep the application runtime configuration clean, and much easier to move service instances across machines if you're too small to invest time in orchestration like K8s.

ahh what. You mean running Hugo deploy to an S3 bucket with a cloudfront distribution infront. It costs like 2 bucks a month. If you're blogging your content is perfect for static site generators. And there's other options that can make it even more simpler than that.

Hugo, s3, cloudfront? That sounds neither simple, nor well suited, for a lot of use cases like the local bakery or artist that wants to maintain a site. Most of the static site generator ecosystem seems to be aimed at developers that want too dabble in solutions way oversized for the problem. I don't need global CDNs for a site that sees loads easily served by WordPress or some other non-sexy CMS on a single instance of a random HTTP server, I need a CMS that I can put on there in 5 minutes, create an account and let people administer content. Sure, I realize there's a) valid use cases and b) options for that in the SSG space but quite a lot of the development there seems like solutions for imaginary or self imposed problems the world at large has moved on from.

I agree that static site generators could really use some better quick start features. But i disagree that turning on WordPress is any less complex. There's a lot more moving parts that your responsible for with wordpress than having a folder full of markdown files. The benefit of a CDN is the fantasy it gives you of people reading your blog en mass. And also it's all managed elsewhere and they handle ssl for you easily.

but you know hike your own hike and all that.

That's fair, I guess I'm a bit biased there by the ecosystem I've been using for decades. I was just thinking of this old stack as a nice middle ground, it's so boring pretty much every hoster is good at managing the major moving parts without any lock in.

Try https://netlify.com. My mother runs a small business, I moved her website from a shitty HostGator setup to there and it's been a charm.

Also, I run my company's website on it (https://assembl.net) and my blog (https://blog.slm.space). Very different sites, but they all run through Netlify. I haven't had a single problem with them.

I think even the most tech-illiterate could use it with their drag+drop site hosting feature + https://forestry.io CMS.

Netlify is one of the few tools where everything is as I expect it. Everything I've done with it has 'just worked' and I love the automatic preview builds that are generated for GitHub PRs.

Every time I break out of its ecosystem, I'm simply horrified. Using an external service from AWS or Google is a nightmare of configuration. They are both preparing on day 1 for your application to become Facebook and Amazon, forcing me to make decisions I don't even begin to judge, and opening pathways through security that might be right or might be complete disasters. The "happy path" for a new user is rarely clear, and the documentation is bewildering because it's aimed at much more difficult cases than mine.

Netlify does a great job of simplyfing to a small number of likely paths. At some point I'd surely break out of its use case and be forced to swim in the much deeper pool of a more general provider, but at least I'll have some grounding to start from.

Static website generator with a markdown editor will end up cheaper probably.

Wordpress or drupal will generally end up easier as long as nothing goes wrong. From my experience with inexperienced use and users stuff will go wrong at some point and then it can be a bit more of a hassle.

They are definitely cheaper, as long as you already employ technical staff.

I've worked as an IT volunteer in a small org, and there was no dedicated tech beyond me. Any kind of setup that I built for authoring the website would have to be as usable by non-technical users as possible, so I went with Wordpress. I had no replacement and there was no-one with enough technical know-how to handle authoring and troubleshooting a cheap static site, so I deliberately chose WP to minimise problems. The cost was 2-3x larger than the cheaper alternatives, but ultimately it was keeping the website up that mattered.

You really don’t need a DB for a blog. Just write to the file system.

You don't even need that. I write my post as a markdown file, commit it, and then gitlab compiles it, hosts it and manages the certificate.

Yes, let's remove our dependence on one corporation and instead put it into a far smaller and riskier one.

Its completely portable. I can dump the same repo on github and it works or I can compile it myself and dump the files on any webserver.

Or if you need a DB, then use SQLite. It's a file that's also a relational database, and it's better than any file scheme you can come up with for this purpose.

It is really not that hard... I spent less time setting some nginx / letsencrypt than trying to configure google loadbalancer for static files with https and their blob storage...

It likely will have a better uptime too and require less maintenance over the years

Debugging? If you could write to disk and suddenly can't.. you are out of diskspace.

If you can't tab complete you are out of diskspace.

Migrating for additional storage? Why not add additional storage..

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

I have Corona

Woah where's this from?

Dune

That is a nice quote, but not helpful. This is a scenario that can happen and does happen, and that needs to be taken into account. Running and supporting anything of appreciable complexity and keeping it secure and legal is not free. I self-host a bunch of things and I do feel this pain quite acutely at times. This can be a very strong argument in favor of SaaS snd should not just be brushed aside.

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