Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

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>We should make it easier for end users to learn how to build their own sites and host them, even if just as static pages.

Its definitely not easy. I recently spun up a public bespoke web server on a $5 VPS. I was surprised by the immediate and constant probes and attacks. Hardening the server was non-trivial for me, as I'm not a professional sysadmin. Nothing was trivial, from setting up DNS to ssh to fail2ban. My setup was as simple as possible (one node, one DNS name, one server process) and it still took me a full two days, plus some extra fiddling, to get it setup properly and reproducibility.

Starting from zero it takes enormous knowledge. Can it be made easier? Yes, I think so. On the high-tech side I think ChatGPT is going to play a role in lowering the learning curve for this kind of stuff. On the low-tech side I think experts could offer help to new learners, but I'm not sure what channels make sense. I'm not sure how it could be simplified without violating the primary purpose of the exercise.

If what you need is a web server, get a web server. You can get decent web hosting for 20€ per year and it will perform a lot better than your 5€ VPS.

Do you have an example? There is no unambiguous way to define "web server"! Consider all the ways you can rent a host in virtually every state between disassembled parts on a table (Newegg) to renting DC for your own hardware (Hetzner) to running an httpd process running in a hypervisor running on a fully managed server in a DC (VPS) to sharing wordpress db/virtual host space on a LAMP process (wordpress.com). And everything in between. (And that's not every option, either. "Push markdown and let github/gitlab publish it for me" or "write a gist" are in this space, as is codepen, meteor, aws, and reddit - really anything tool or stack that lets you "change the state of the public web". Even HN!).

In fact, understanding this spectrum of options is a task in itself - imagine starting from scratch and trying to pick a path!

At what point on this spectrum do you transition away from "self hosting"? Personally, I put the line at "vanilla VPS". I do not consider sharing wordpress space self-hosted, nor is having a webmin. (And yet, either is certainly more self-hosted than a Facebook group page!) My approach was "device oriented" in that I wanted to act as if I was configuring a fresh piece of server hardware with a new OS and so on. The cheapest way to get that is a VPS. It is at this level that I feel I have the most flexibility, the least lock in, and, importantly, the most leverage.

Shared webhosting as a concept is decades old and still works. You just upload your web pages via (S)FTP and then you can access them on the internet. That's how most people (including me) got started around 10-20 years ago.

I'm still hosting my personal websites on a shared host today, because it just works and requires no maintenance on my end.

Thanks for explaining. I had no idea the issue was so simple.

the service https://www.pair.com has been highly reliable for me for ~20 years now.

I use their "shared web hosting" tier and just upload a static site to my $HOME/public_html directory where it's served by their system. Very simple, and you control the site content (html/css/js and images or whatnot).

I understand the processes required but if you or anyone here knows, what would be the least expensive / most sustainable way to set up a personal VPN & pihole plus a simple website hosted on a server?

I already run a small server at home for NAS / HomeAssistant / PiHole, etc., but I would like to be able to access it anywhere and enjoy the benefits of ad blocking and personal media access on my phone outside of my home network, but I don't want to spend $25+/month for crap tier single 9 service, and at the same time, I don't need flawless service with five 9 uptime guarantees at any price, either.

I'm guessing that I would need a VPS provider that allows SSH access to some flavor of linux server with a static IP or at least a domain name.

Am I on the money with this, or is there something that I didn't consider?

If I am, would you still recommend pair.com or is there a VPS provider that might be a better fit?

For something like this, I’d look at a small cloud instance running at Hetzner or similar. You can run Pihole on that so you don’t have to reflect your traffic through your home Internet connection. You can then use something like ZeroTier or Tailscale to be able to access your home server and the Pihole service while you’re on the road, so you’re not worried about making services available to the whole Internet.

Wym

Back in the 2000s you could just use Microsoft Frontpage, pay for a web host, click upload and your static site would be online in a few hours.

I’m sure there’s still some variation of that out there.

I am doing Obsidian > publish to html > upload to neocities.org account.

Easy peazy.

This is _exactly_ what i meant! Can you share yours?

> I was surprised by the immediate and constant probes and attacks. Hardening the server was non-trivial for me

What hardening do you need? My impression was that, with a good password (or password login disabled) a standard Debian + Apache setup was secure enough by default.

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