Every Phone Should Be Able to Run Personal Website
rohanrd.xyz
rohanrd.xyz
- it doesn’t work when you, personally, go somewhere with flaky internet
- it runs down your phone battery
- it’s really slow when you, personally, aren’t connected to wifi
- on that rare day when it goes viral… it’s not just your website that gets DOSed, but also your net connection
- also DNS updates don’t propagate fast enough to cope with you joining different Wi-Fi networks
But my own sites (+email, DNS, etc) are running off-grid in my kitchen on a RPi which is basically a smart-phone chip-set, and can cope with an occasional Mastodon/HN/Slashdot(!) stampede. Typical power consumption ~1W. Faster response in the UK than many sites behind CloudFlare...
> also DNS updates don’t propagate fast enough to cope with you joining different Wi-Fi networks
True. But imagine if we had perfected this since 2009 we would have had a solution today. Same goes for other things.
It makes sense to host stuff you want to share on sort of server in a data centre somewhere, even if you think of that server as basically a cache.
And no, I would still have no internet access when I was in a train tunnel, even if there had been a big push behind this sort of hosting.
Hacker News has had discussion about a 1mb site that has offered free hosting.
It seems like unforeseen complexity from that would come from mobile providers allowing the ports needed, and DDNS; if you want it public.
Although I wonder if something wild like hosting a server at a known location (VPS), using a VPN from your phone to that server, and then having DDNS and all that go to that server and be forwarded (proxy?) to the phone? Can maybe even set something up to show site viewers the page isn't available until you connect back to wifi if your phone isn't connected to the VPN or if the server can't proxy the requests to it.
worldwideweb https://apps.apple.com/us/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id16230068...