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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

If you are a builder/creator (even hobbies, with 2 users) and generate contents, please get your own domain. Either you use a service/tool or otherwise but own the content. If you use a service and is important enough, take backups.

Own your content, use eveything else as tools.

These days, the question I usually ask is, "Can I walk out of this and what do I have to do if I need to?"

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Domains are super cheap and easy to get. Everyone should have one (especially anyone who calls themself a hacker). Ideally you would also self-host your servers, but having your own domain is the most important thing, because you can always change your hosting provider, whereas it is impossible to go back in time and rewrite all of the links to your old (now deleted) medium.com blog. "Owning" a domain just means you get to route DNS lookups for that domain to any IP address of your choosing, which can be your own IP, Amazon's IP, GitHub's IP, or any other IP.

GitHub Pages (or GitLab Pages, if you prefer) will host your website for free. You don't even have to know HTML to make your site look fancy, just basic Markdown; GitHub will run your Markdown files through the Jekyll static site generator by default (this can be disabled by adding a blank ".nojekyll" file to the root of your repository).

Assuming you have a GitHub account and that you only need to serve static (HTML/JS/CSS) files, launching a site with your very own domain name is as easy as:

1. Buy a domain from the registrar of your choice

2. Create a repository called "<yourusername>.github.io" and a "index.md" or "index.html" at the root

3. Go to https://github.com/<yourusername>/<yourusername>.github.io/s..., select the "master" branch as the publishing source, and enter your domain (excluding the "www.") under "custom domain"

6. Go to your domain registrar's website, and find your DNS settings. Create four "A" records pointing to GitHub's IP addresses: "185.199.108.153", "185.199.109.153", "185.199.110.153", and "185.199.111.153". Create a "CNAME" record pointing "www.<yourdomain>" to "<yourusername>.github.io"

Then if GitHub decides to block/censor/ban you, all you have to do is switch to a different provider (or potentially self-host). If your registrar blocks you, you can transfer your domain to another one.

What type of sites can be hosted on github pages? Can github pages be used free by anyone for any site? Can I have a blog under my own domain (with ads and make money) where I write about random stuff not relatade to any github project?

Feels like there must be alot of limitations, like not for profit, limited bandwidth/pageviews per month, and must be github project oriented etc or?

According to GitHub:

> You can use GitHub Pages to showcase some open source projects, host a blog, or even share your résumé

> GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS)

> In addition, your use of GitHub Pages is subject to the GitHub Terms of Service, including the restrictions on get-rich-quick schemes, sexually obscene content, and violent or threatening content or activity

> GitHub Pages sites have a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month

https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

There are certainly better hosting options out there that provide more freedom, but GitHub Pages is nice for someone who just wants to get a personal site up and running without much fuss.

> but having your own domain is the most important thing, because you can always change your hosting provider

What if your hosting provider or authorities seize your domain?

Authorities and locked platforms aren’t the same problem.

But definitely don’t buy a domain through a content platform. Buy it from a registrar and manually link it to whatever hosting/content platform you’re using. Preferably hosting with offsite backups that can actually be used to reconstitute a site elsewhere.

I like Nearlyfreespeech.net for stuff like this. For $1.50 per month, they let you easily host static HTML files. You don't have to learn about servers or routing or anything.

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing

Why not just use GitHub pages or it's equivalent gitlab alternative when you're already going static files?

Super easy to maintain as publishing is always just a commit away and if you're feeling fancy you can pivot to your static site generator of choice later

All fun and games until Microsoft closes your repo on a false dmca claim.

The same applies to literally all other offerings. If the other party ceases to do business with you, you're just SOL. Not even a custom domain will protect you from that, as your register can effectively terminate it without releasing the domain.

It's always a question if risks, and they're miniscule for both GitHub and gitlab

+1 to this. Out of the frying pan (Medium) into the fire (Microsoft).

Does anybody else find their pricing quite, uhm, labyrinthine?

This.

I'm not sure why the hell anyone would do anything else to be honest. It has been an insane proposition putting content on something you don't control.

I agree in principle, but for people who just want to focus on their project, it’s a heavy tax to learn how domains and content and everything work.

Medium’s promise is “you focus on writing, we’ll deal with distributing.” They don’t live up to that promise in lots of ways, but it’s hard to fault someone for not wanting to deal with the tech.

Is learning how to navigate the DMV system in any US state less "heavy"? I think Medium and others contribute to the problem by perpetuating the myth that ordinary folks can't do it/ it's just too hard. How we break through that is something to think about.

Yes, if you just show up to the DMV they will tell you what you need to do. You only need to self-actualize and figure things out ahead of time to get things done faster than multiple iterations of going there and waiting in line. Remember, the DMV has to deal with the below average members of the public.

For the topic's problem, I'd love to see some automated setup app that would take a "VPS host account", and do all of the installation/configuration to support service(s) running Free software to accomplish a high level task (eg a blog). Like a graphical NixOps with precanned configurations.

You'd need to initially cut down the number of options (say VPS account must be at one of 2 hosts, domain must be at one of 2 registrars), but I think the main problem would be trying to straddle so many abstraction levels.

So I’m a writer with a deep passion for tropical fruits, and I want to start a blog. How do I find your setup app, or even know that I need it?

Yes, I agree that discovery and creating a self-perpetuating critical mass is the hardest aspect of this. Heck, I'm sure some incarnation of this app already exists, but technical people don't need it (so it's not popular here), and non-technical people don't know that they need it. Meanwhile Medium seemingly advertises their own offering on each of their customers blogs.

How to overcome this? Maybe it would be enough to be in some mobile app stores with a distinctive memorable name (despite the horrible UX on mobile), and have a slowly accreting fanbase. Then every time these issues flare up someone would say 'Install LibreZooks to run your blog" in addition to all of those "just use DO and Docker" comments. People do seem to be moving to Mastodon slowly with the current happenings, but decentralized-first stuff can never match the advertising saturation of well funded surveillance companies.

There's also the difficulty that many people these days aren't publishing just to publish, but they're publishing as a side hustle or hoping to get rich. So middlemen like Medium that promise to extract as much as possible and then share a cut have another leg up over "default options" like running Google ads or whatever.

DMV is maybe not the best analogy since it’s more or less mandatory and people can’t choose to invest more time/money to do it better.

How about car repair? As a car enthusiast, I think anyone who fails to invest time and energy to really understand how cars work, from cv joints to TPMS systems, is putting themselves at the mercy of repair shops that can be capricious.

And financial planning, and yard care, and zoning policy, and. . .

Point being, life is too complex for everyone to be an expert in everything they depend on. And we all depend on things where we’re not even expert enough to know the implicit assumptions and dependencies we’re taking on.

I don’t think we can break through that. I’d love to be wrong, but I just don’t see a way for people to have deep understanding of every tool they use while still doing the stuff they want to do.

It is hard to self-host properly. Getting started can be easy with a good tutorial but securing your software and server can be difficult, and even the pros often fail. We're still all suffering the effects of unmaintained, insecure Wordpress installs over the years.

Well there's an entry cost or an exit cost or a risk. If the tradeoff makes sense then spot on but if Medium pulls your stuff you have an untenable risk tradeoff.

This is why I don't write articles. The investment vs return is low based on the exit costs, risks and benefits.

Seems an odd choice for a developer, for sure. I'm with all those who also have pointed out that self-hosting is the better route. Heck, as mentioned here, a compromise for this particular user would be to host the code on github and then use github pages for a nice companion site.

I typically go the github pages route. I used to buy domains for every project I spun up, but the collective bill started to add up for a bunch of very low traffic sites for projects that didn’t pan out. Now I just use github.io.

The other concern is legacy. I’m getting up there in age. I would like some of my work to continue to be useful after I retire without me paying for domain renewals or worrying about hosting. Without my intervention a github.io site will probably outlast a onionisafruit.com site.

> but the collective bill started to add up for a bunch of very low traffic sites for projects that didn’t pan out.

Then maybe group them on a domain with subdomains or just subpages?

IDK, clicking reply and typing into a box sure seems easier than spinning up a domain for this comment.

> This.

You're not on Reddit, pal.

“This” is fine as long as it isn’t the only content of the comment. It is simply a signal that the following text isn’t meant to contradict what they are replying to. It’s a simple shorthand for “I wholeheartedly agree, and furthermore …”

I find it irritating, but I can see your point.

As the poster who posted it, it irritates me but it saves a lot of typing and is a well understood idiom.

I don't understand why people use Medium or similar gated blogging platforms. It is so easy to use Wordpress. You can get a domain name with managed wordpress install ready to roll for less than $50 a year. And you become the owner of your own publications.

Or if you want to do it yourself, just install a Ghost Docker container in some spare space of that $5 Digital Ocean instance, and you are ready to go.

With a $5 DO instance I've got a self hosted recipe book (RecipeSage), Bookmark Service (LinkAce), blogging platform (Ghost) and also use it as a Socks Proxy. I've got nightly backups for $1.5 and everything was as easy as docker-compose up.

I understand non-technical people suffering the issues of internet deplatforming, but for a self-named "The Practical Dev" ?

Substack is nice because it handles email distribution, has free podcast hosting and RSS feeds for separate "sections" of your newsletter/podcast, and handles payment stuff. I could do the same things for Wordpress, but each of those functions is likely a (premium) plugin, with its own layer of tinkering, installation, config, updates, etc.

When Medium was better, it was easy to get a good domain for the same handle as your Twitter, with a good UI/readable final product. It's changed a lot since and kinda sucks now, but it's a step up from people using Pastebin as their blog.

I would like to clarify that I'm not against Medium or any other tool/platform. In fact, I'm a pro subscriber so I can read some of the nice people writing there and I hope I'm helping them. And, some of my writings were pretty circulated and my account has over 4,500 followers. I have disabled few other accounts (company) that were not so bad.

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