Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhitza | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately it doesn't offer free hosting for hobbyists. Even for superficial traffic you'll have pay 1 euro a month (plus VAT).

Not many DNS management providers (that I'm aware of, please correct me) support CNAME flattening. That is having your A record point to a CNAME.

Every time I purge the pull zone cache, I do it twice, cause once from my CI isn't enough. My CI does individual page cache invalidation during deployment, but there needs to be some kind of delay (with no feedback) when assets are distributed across.

View on HN

Other commenters laughing at you for the price... It's not about the price it's about the barrier. Even if I love a service, I won't get very many people to try it if they need to enter a credit card.

I get that credit cards are a barrier of entry but I’m more willing to give providers a break now that AI agents make it much easier to abuse free tiers. It’s also harder for smaller companies to offer free tiers. If we want a more diverse set of service providers we as customers need to be willing to accept some trade-offs.

It's also a barrier for education.

Almost all technological choices I made as a teen were driven by "what hosting can I get for free, as my parents sure as hell won't put down their payment information for that". Back then that usually meant PHP and a max. 50MB MySQL.

If you've ever offered an online service, charging "the dollar" reduces a ton of spam/abuse you have to deal with.

I have been the service provider who had to paywall just to stop the spammers and you're right. But it's also true that kids will be collateral damage (or anyone without a credit card).

In my case, and it was the 90s, I took the time to setup a way to pay by calling a premium (1-900) for $1.49 number so the barrier to entry even for kids was still reasonable.

Maybe in modern day the equivalent is adding Google pay and Apple pay then you cover some kids at least (gift cards and such).

Quite the hassle for the provider, and it will turn away any person who cares about privacy. There's no way to win anymore.

If a parent can buy their kid a computer, they can pay 1 euro a month for a CDN in the rare case they need it. This is a bad argument.

I think the point is that many HNer’s had parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t do “computer things”

Pay 1 Euro a month... or 1000s if their kid fucks up.

I had trouble explaining to my parents what a BBS was. I wouldn't want to explain what a CDN is.

If entering a credit card is too much you probably aren't a potential customer. Part of keeping a service low cost is keeping services efficient. Having a large pool of people using it for free who will never become customers will force the cost higher for those who do pay.

Good riddance to the "free" model. It's never actually free. You either pay with your data, or have to consume ads, or you're forcing other customers to pay for your free usage.

oh no a euro a month for a service. How will we financially recover?

not everyone lives in the USA or earns USA based salaries.

also I said this in a another thread, they charges 1$ even for single testing http request.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873521

Feel free to use local services then, not every company has to support the entire world. Some are fine with a small slice. Expecting otherwise isn't sustainable for the sub trillion dollar non-monopolists companies, not without massive public support from the government at least.

I'm not in the USA or earn USA salary but I can pay 1 euro a month for a thing.

Why would you be a useful target market for a business running these services then? Seriously, if you can't pay anything at all, of what value is catering product offerings to you? It is thus irrelevant that you aren't happy with not being offered a free service.

> Unfortunately it doesn't offer free hosting for hobbyists. Even for superficial traffic you'll have pay 1 euro a month (plus VAT).

So 1 euro a month is too expensive for you? Wow.

Just pay the 1 Euro or go to GitHub where that is free but goes down almost every week.

The absence of free offering is not a bug in this case, it's a feature.

Man, come on now, it's 1.20 EUR a month.

Of course it's nothing, but it's also not a set it an forget kind of thing, which in many ways for hobbyists is why cloudflare/github pages are nice.

Yes, it's nice to have a trillion+ dollar monopoly able to subsidize loss leaders to put your competitors out of business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com