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Comment by weejewel | Hacker News Reader

But now you’re paying for keeping a server online, whereas a GitHub page could’ve hosted this static website for free.

He did this for fun, his motivation wasn't to find the cheapest way to host his content.

It's also not like you'd have to have a separate server/vserver for every such project, a very affordable vserver will run quite a lot of nginx containers. Plus I guess some people will have a vserver or something like that anyway (I have a small one to get around NAT at the ISP level), in which case it might be net-zero.

>get around NAT at the ISP level

genuinely interested in the benefits of this. care to share?

My ISP puts everyone behind some sort of NAT, which means I can't reach my home network from elsewhere since I can't open ports. They'd let me buy my own IP address for a monthly fee, but I've found that an old Pi I already had, an autossh-ed reverse shell, SSH forwarding and a cheap cloud instance work just fine for checking sensors and the like, cost less and the cloud instance has other uses, too.

I see, so NAT traversal over SSH as opposed to VPN/DDNS

I honestly don't understand where's the fun in using docker for anything.

Unless one is into masochism.

Especially to host what could be implemented as a single static HTML file.

React is compiled to static content so this could be hosted with GitHub pages too

I build static sites in Docker too. But then simply extract the built files out and upload them to any static hosting I need.

This allows me to self contain all the build tooling. And allows other developers to setup a dev environment in a few easy steps.

There's no reason that this would have to be hosted on a traditional server.

Free as in beer, yes

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