How to Serve over 100K Web Pages a Day on a Slower Home Internet Connection

https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/low-bandwidth-hosting-tips.html

by sT370ma2 • 6 years ago

311 165 6 years ago

gjs278• 6 years ago

I ran garyshood.com off of a pentium 3 dell poweredge and a comcast connection in its peak (2009-2012). I couldn't offer an upload speed of more than 20-40kb/s without slowing down the house. but with traffic shaping rules and following most of what he's outlined here, it was easy. it wasn't even cpubound, it was just network bound, but I could still handle 100-300k unique visits a month. I did have to host the downloadable exe for the autoclicker on a third party for $3 a month, even at 120kb that thing would use too much house bandwidth.

ronyfadel2• 6 years ago

Or just use Netlify for static websites. It’s free. One of my blog posts got 50k views in 24 hours and Netlify didn’t bat an eye.

Tistron• 6 years ago

I'm also using this, and now that I need some dynamic stuff to allow booking me in my calendar, I found that I also get simple access to aws lambdas for free, way enough for little me.

sneak3• 6 years ago

Netlify has strict limits in their TOS on what you are allowed to host there. There’s lots of legal content that you might want to publish that you aren’t allowed to put on Netlify.

Additionally, their uploader CLI is spyware, and their corporate stance on this is that you agreed to their uploader tool spying on you when you created your Netlify account.

They also can’t pull from private git hosting, only the big public ones (which are themselves ethically questionable), which makes using Netlify for builds a bit of an issue if you, for example, self host Gitea or GitLab.

I use a PaaS (sort of a self-hosted Heroku) called CapRover that pulls/builds from a self-hosted Gitea on branch change. It’s a relatively small change to drop a two-stage Dockerfile into an jekyll/hugo repo that does the build in step one then copies only the resulting static files into a totally off the shelf/vanilla nginx container in stage 2 for runtime hosting.

For my main website, I still have cloudflare in front of that.

ronyfadel2• 6 years ago

For readers of this comment and myself: - why is the uploader spyware? - what kind of legal content is not permitted?

What you’re doing is exactly the sort of thing I don’t want to worry about

willvarfar2• 6 years ago

This is a tangent, but I want to add to the less-is-more vibe!

I run some surprisingly-spiky-and-high-traffic blogs for independent journalists and authors, that kind of thing. Lots of media files.

There are two ways this typically goes: either you use some platform, and try and get a custom domain name to badge it with, or else you imagine some complicated content-management system with app servers, databases, elastic search clusters etc?

At the time wordpress etc weren't attractive. I have no idea what that landscape is like now, or even what was so unattractive about wp then, but anyway...

So we're doing it with an old python tornado webserver with one core, 256MB RAM VM at a small hosting provider. (I think we started with 128MB RAM, but that offering got discontinued years ago. It might now be 512MB, I'd have to check. Whateever it is, its the smallest VM we can buy.) The webserver is started-if-crashed using cron minute and flock -n.

The key part of the equation is that the hosting provider I use did away with monthly quotas. Instead, they just throttle bandwidth. So when the HN or some other crowd descends, the pages just take longer to load. There is never the risk of a nastygram asking for more money or threatening to turn off stuff or error messages saying some backend db is unavailable etc.

Total cost? Under $20/month. I think domains cost more than hosting.

The last time I even checked up on this little vm? More than a year ago, I think. Perhaps two? Hmm, maybe I should search for the ssh details...

My personal blog is static and is on gh-pages. A fine enough choice for techies.

rubatuga• 6 years ago

$20 seems a bit expensive considering there are $5 VMs

willvarfar2• 6 years ago

Yes we probably aren't using the cheapest host in the world. It probably wasn't even the cheapest when we chose it. We chose it because I'd used them in my day job and liked their style and support. And the bandwidth throttle rather than quota is really attractive too.

And I think that more than half of the monthly cost is actually the amortized domain renewal fees etc, not the vms themselves.

So we could probably save a few dollars if we shopped around and moved? But I've just spent more time writing on HN today than I normally spend in a year on thinking about these old servers....

icebraining3• 6 years ago

Static sites can be a fine choice for non-techies too. A non-profit I work with manages theirs using Publii, which pushes the static site to Netlify. The whole thing is free (except the domain), and quite easy to move.

cjdell• 6 years ago

Another way would be to upload your site to your local IPFS node. Your files will be automatically cached by other IPFS nodes as people discover your site providing free load balancing and redundancy.

Your site will still be viewable even after you turn your local node off until all traffic goes to zero and the caches eventually expire.

https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/examples/websites/

ajayyy3• 6 years ago

I think web torrent would work better in this context

sylvain_kerkour• 6 years ago

Hi OP, you seem to be the author of the blog (according to your post history). Your contact email seems not working so I will write it here: Just a big thank you for you blog! I take so much pleasure to read it at least once a week! THIS is the internet I like!

ciprian_craciun• 6 years ago

The article features some very good advice, regardless of how you actually host the site, that should be followed by many other sites around the web...

It basically boils down to the old KISS principle "keep-it-stupid-simple".

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

the old KISS principle "keep-it-stupid-simple"

Actually, that's wrong in an important way.

KISS is "keep it simple, stupid", with the emphasis on the last word, referring to you.

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

I prefer "Keep It Simple, Silly"

PeterStuer• 6 years ago

I do wonder how all this compares in overall costs and performance to just serving the static website from S3 or B2?

https://www.grahn.io/posts/2020-02-08-s3-vs-b2-static-web-ho...

meerita2• 6 years ago

I use Digital Ocean $5 VMs and I never had any problem serving +100k a day on static pages.

icebraining3• 6 years ago

Sure, but $5/month is still $60/year. You could probably buy a new Raspberry Pi every year and pay for its electricity for that kind of money.

(This assumes you already have an internet connection at home, of course)

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

^ This exactly. A half-decent used Thinkpad can be picked up for slightly north of $120. And it will have 4-8x RAM and at least 4-5x CPU performance. And you own it! The only thing you potentially miss out on is: uptime SLAs ("reliability") and a higher-speed internet connection.

You also might miss out on a public IPv4 address, but that's whole 'nother issue... FRP (fast reverse proxy) is a decent workaround for this.

virvar• 6 years ago

This was my thoughts going into it, unfortunately a static ip turned out to cost around the same where I live. :(

dig1• 6 years ago

Depends what you are serving. If you are going to host low traffic blog or site, that can go unpredictably offline and be offline for days, this is OK.

I was doing this for some time and all the nuances with it (assuming electricity and internet are cheap, which isn't the case) makes it still unprofitable on the long run. ISPs usually have really bad upload, port blacklist (e.g. irc), connection unexpectedly drops during the night or day, DNS resolvers or forwarders usually are miss-configured and so on. Support for requests outside "my internet is not working" is often zero (e.g. "your DNS isn't configured properly").

I didn't even start with DDoS (ssh, http) attacks, port scans and even crawler hits (some crawlers by even reputable search engines can be nasty) - all these things will eat your monthly quota without even serving a byte of your site to human visitor. And don't forget visitor impatience these days - if site isn't loaded under a second or two, no more visits :)

OrgNet• 6 years ago

I use a cheap VPS provider and I pay $10/year... there are cheaper ones: http://www.lowendstock.com/

meerita2• 6 years ago

I am not really good setting up my own server. I would do that, but i am a designer.

bufferoverflow2• 6 years ago

If you're serving 100K+ impressions/day, you probably make a lot more than $5/month from it.

ramraj073• 6 years ago

How about just putting your static site in S3? What happens when traffic spikes (other than increase in bandwidth)?

hagy• 6 years ago

Exactly. For an entirely static website, I can't see any reason not to host content in cloud storage and serve through a CDN (e.g., CloudFront or Cloudflare). You get the advantage of low cost when running at low volume and the ability to scale up as needed.

Further, your users will get lower latency and faster downloads when accessing one of the globally-distributed edge caches. And lastly, you don't have to expose your own IP address, which puts at risk of DDoS.

Does anyone have a good argument for self-hosting an entirely static website?

majewsky• 6 years ago

I don't want to make my visitors more trackable than absolutely necessary. Sure, my ISP and their ISP will know that they connected to me, but not to which site thanks to TLS. If I host on CloudFront, Amazon knows exactly which pages they viewed at which time because they can see inside the TLS connection.

haggy• 6 years ago

Yes and no. The classic adage of "what if" tends to fly into these conversations prematurely.

Let's face facts. Most personal sites won't see a giant boost in traffic unexpectedly. Which means hosting and paying a cloud provider is completely unnecessary.

If you happen to become popular enough (the 1%) THEN you start to consider some scaling patterns.

wpietri• 6 years ago

Having just moved some of my static sites to S3+Cloudfront, I think the main reason to self-host would be self-education. AWS is great, but it's quite opaque compared to having your stuff right there on a box you can poke at.

There's also a distinct vendor portability advantage. If you want to move your self-hosted static site from your home connection somewhere else, it's pretty straightforward. But if I want to move my static sites from Amazon to some other cloud vendor, I basically have to start my Terraform from scratch.

eeZah7Ux2• 6 years ago

For an entirely static website, I can't see any reason not to host content in cloud storage and serve through a CDN

Caring about the privacy of your readers.

_wldu3• 6 years ago

It's more fun. You have complete control and you learn more. It's like building a Morse code key from spare parts rather than buying one from the store.

Having said that, I think NearlyFreeSpeech provides a great web hosting service for pennies a day for those who don't want to host at home. I've used them for years. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing

Lammy2• 6 years ago

The type of people interested in self-hosting to the point of being willing to do so over a shitty ADSL connection aren't likely to be interested in just hosting on AWS.

dillonmckay3• 6 years ago

I have a similar performing DSL connection, and just pay Linode $6/mo to host a site with a ‘real’ connection.

hakube• 6 years ago

Host your website on Netlify and Cloudflare so you don't have to worry about bandwidth, power/network interruption

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

As someone who just moved away from the exact Github->Netlify-Cloudflare stack... here's my two cents.

Yes, it does make deploys easier. You don't "have to think" anymore. Well, that's the argument.

I self-host by creating a git bare repo on a server, ala `git init --bare mysite.com.git` and cloning that repo again for the web server (`git clone mysite.com.git mysite.com`). Now add this git hook in the bare repo:

  #!/bin/bash
  cd /home/ryan/mysite.com
  unset GIT_DIR
  git restore .
  git pull
  exec ./build.sh >/dev/null

Now my deploys take a second and become visible immediately. If you are intending on serving 1000s of requests per second, sure you might need CDNs and caching. But... if your hosting a portfolio/blog website, you might not need it. On top of that, demonstrating knowledge of backends is never a bad thing for a personal website.

oefrha2• 6 years ago

1. Your deployment is not atomic. Probably should consider checking out to and building in a different directory, then atomically switch (symlink is an easy way to achieve atomicity).

2. Using a good CDN ensures your site is fairly responsive on (hopefully) all continents. Your server probably isn’t. Your closet server — even less.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

"Join a silo" is exactly the last thing somebody interested in selfhosting for selfhosting's sake is going to want to do =p

gruez• 6 years ago

The article literally says to use a CDN.

ulisesrmzroche• 6 years ago

Why don’t y’all ever read the article before commenting? As if no one is going to notice

steveklabnik• 6 years ago

Netlfiy is great, but we (Cloudflare) also have Workers Sites, which lets you do it 100% in Cloudflare: https://workers.cloudflare.com/sites

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

I just recently started hosting my personal website in my closet on a laptop: https://notryan.com.

I also host a Discourse forum. It's pretty snappy for being in my closet (https://forum.webfpga.com) Beats paying DigitalOcean $15/month ($180/year!) for a machine with 2vCPU + 2 GB RAM (the minimum for Discourse).

I think more people should consider self-hosting, especially if it's not critical. It makes the Internet more diverse for sure.

afterwalk• 6 years ago

The static ip is free?

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

I've searched far and wide haha; the cheapest I can find them is $3.50/month from Vultr. I'm almost ready to switch to DDNS though. The threat of DDOS scares me a little bit. We have 300 mbps down though, so I don't forsee it being a terrible problem. I guess I would just call my ISP if something sketchy was going on.

I'd like to imagine that my content is not DDOS-worthy though :)

znpy2• 6 years ago

My ISP gives a public and static IPv4 if you ask for it. Yes it's free.

Also, with IPv6 you have plenty of IPs...

ajayyy3• 6 years ago

My ISP gives a "dynamic" IP, but it only changes if the router is shut off.

aembleton• 6 years ago

Just use Cloudflare for your name severs. Then you can have a script that runs every 5 minutes on a cron to update your dns A records via the Cloudflare API

jventura2• 6 years ago

Just to let you know that the link to server.c (at least in the blog index) is not working..

Cool project by the way! I'm thinking doing the same with a Rpy..

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

Should be up! There are moments of brief, brief downtime when I switch binary versions. Guess you refreshed in the 5 second window when I was recompiling. I run Ctrl+c then up-arrow in tmux. Next step is to write a general supervisor the listens for SIGHUP :)

(Of course, as many people will tell me, this already exists. But sometimes, it's okay to do things for the sake of learning... come on, HN)

sneak3• 6 years ago

I agree with it from an architectural standpoint, but it violates the TOS of most residential ISPs in the US and endangers your internet connection if it starts seeing any significant traffic.

ISPs there are usually monopolies or duopolies so you run the risk of having to buy slower/pricier service, or being totally offline, if one shuts you off.

dillonmckay3• 6 years ago

Endangers internet connection?

The guy has less than 1Mbps upload bandwidth.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

I feel this is somewhat outdated advice.

Thanks to restrictive firewalls, much incoming and outgoing traffic to services is tunneled over HTTP/HTTPS and uses the standard 80/443 ports. There are also legitimate reasons to have 80/443 open such as access to security systems, your home router, etc. They can't block incoming 80 or 443 without breaking a lot of things, so they won't. It's not the 90's anymore.

You really have to worry more about hitting your 1TB Comcast bandwidth cap.

speedgoose2• 6 years ago

Scaleway or OVH (kimsufi) offer 2vCPU and 2GB of ram for around 3€ to 4€ per month.

ClumsyPilot2• 6 years ago

I have never used them specifically, but usually its shared compute - you are not getting an entire cpu core for yourself.

In my benchmarks I have found that a laptop with 4th gen i5 beats a $80/month Azure VM. You are paying thoufh the nose for redundancy and stuff

ViViDboarder2• 6 years ago

Yep. I host on Scaleway for services I want accessible from the internet. Can’t really beat the price.

Also, despite living in the US, I like that my server is in in Paris. It’s EU and sounds super posh. Ha

hundchenkatze2• 6 years ago

It's great to see someone self-hosting, and I noticed your note about seeing a blue header if running ipfs. I'm running ipfs with the companion extension. However, I can't resolve your dnslink.

  ipfs resolve -r /ipns/notryan.com
  > Error: context deadline exceeded

I tried the ipns multihash too:

  ipfs resolve -r /ipns/QmZaQZyPXjyXWB2FZUUXV9Ft5qciCDMX6CPP2FmiuPSyAq
  > Error: context deadline exceeded

You may not be forwarding your swarm address port, 4001 by default, to your laptop. I'm pretty new to ipfs so take this with a grain of salt.

edit: It's worth noting that I can access other ipfs content using my gateway :)

edit2: I also noticed you're hardcoding the local gateway port to 8080 for your header background image. This port is configurable, mine is set to 5080.

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

Ah, yeah I don't have IPNS running right now. Also my website is not up to date on IPFS right now... maybe I'll resync it today. Anyways, this is a shortcut to it https://notryan.com/ipfs. IPNS was annoyingly slow (30+ second resolves) due to how it functioned in the past. So I stopped using it. I think they changed this in 0.5.0 so it might be better now.

The blue banner was just a hack where the referenced jpeg loads if available. It's a call to url("http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/QmX63Pan72CB2vMhNiFMKxKgEhmffbkgE..."); which is a Monet painting I like.

Basically, if you've got IPFS you'll see a bar. If not, you'll see nothing. Did that at least work? If you had `ipfs daemon` running in the background on port 8080, you should've seen something.

geek_at• 6 years ago

Haha that's how I started my business 15 years ago. I was still in school and I got a few old ThinkPads with broken displays so I installed debian on them, put them in my shelf and sold webhosting.

Good times. I did a writeup 5 years ago how it looked like: https://blog.haschek.at/2015-my-company-just-turned-10.html (down at "Our Hardware")

nathan-io• 6 years ago

I'm running Discourse on a $5/mo droplet, 1 vcPU 1GB RAM. I just added 4GB of swap space. No issues so far.

me551ah• 6 years ago

Alternative.

Get a cheap openvz box from lowendbox which will cost you between 3-15$ a year.

https://lowendbox.com/tag/yearly/

mudeth• 6 years ago

I think OpenVZ is obsolete at this point. It still uses the 2.6 kernel and you cannot upgrade. Also the architecture makes it easier to oversell.

KVM is a better choice for public-facing sites, even if it's pricier.

rcarmo• 6 years ago

My personal web site spent years on slow cable/DSL, and I used Coral CDN at the time to deal with peak traffic. Today I have 1Gbps/200Mbps fiber and keep it running off a tiny free VPS with Cloudflare, and sometimes wonder if I need the VPS at all.

(One of the reasons I moved it off my LAN was security - not providing an ingress point, etc.)

rathel• 6 years ago

It's not reassuring that the domain nyud.net CoralCDN is using has expired.

weinzierl• 6 years ago

From what I remember it was always just a research project...

themaxdavitt• 6 years ago

I was just about to try to grab this and try to contact them to return it, but the WHOIS records say it actually is still registered to them, and it expires in 2023. Phew! Maybe they need to update some DNS records?

anaxag0ras• 6 years ago

Can you post the link to the tiny free VPS you're using? I was thinking of using Heroku free tier but the 'cold start' latency is too much.

bufferoverflow2• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure both AWS and Google Cloud have a free tier enough to run basic websites. I've been running mine on Google Cloud. AWS has all kinds of nice freebies too. Like 25GB of DynamoDB with 200M requests/month, and AWS Lambda with 1 million requests/month.

dillonmckay3• 6 years ago

Can you setup a local server in a DMZ?

bullen5• 6 years ago

I dither all my images on the front page: http://sprout.rupy.se

The platform is open-source: https://github.com/tinspin/sprout

ryanmjacobs16• 6 years ago

Wow that loads so fast. I should start doing that.

mkl5• 6 years ago

You really shouldn't. You can get smaller file sizes with better quality using better formats, e.g. JPEG. (See my sibling comment.)

NikolaeVarius• 6 years ago

234 requests 555.06 KB / 371.64 KB transferred Finish: 41.65 s DOMContentLoaded: 672 ms load: 1.45 s

Still going....

mkl5• 6 years ago

Dithering doesn't compress very well, so JPEG can do far better quality for the same file size, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/FXQWF23.jpg instead of your http://sprout.rupy.se/file/3/0/0/annaleefisher-200.gif

BTW, your drag and drop triggers on right click, so weird things happen when using the right click menu.

awiesenhofer• 6 years ago

Totally agree on size, but i quite prefer the dithered look over the highly visible jpg artifacts

bullen5• 6 years ago

Sure but then you need to pre-compress the file, using CPU to zip files on the fly like most servers do is bad.

I only add compression on a need basis manually. CPU is the most scarce resource.

jbaber• 6 years ago

Are you avoiding Atkinson dithering?

bullen5• 6 years ago

I prefer Floyd–Steinberg, it's softer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

apotheon• 6 years ago

Open source?

Where's the license?

arcade79• 6 years ago

Reading through the webpage, I was thinking that points 1, 2 and 4 really wasn't relevant. We're talking about bandwidth limitations being the key factor here - not the rest.

1. Page Loading Issues are irrelevant, unless it's because of large items served over limited bandwidth. 2. Static vs Dynamic webpages are irrelevant, if the pages themselves are small. Dynamic of course incurs some CPU on the server-side, but that is a machine not bandwidth issue. 3. Limiting the amount of data is obviously important. 4. Number of requests to the server is only relevant for the request-size, CPU and tcp-overhead (which can be alleviated via multiplexing). 5. Yes, do compress the pages. 6. Agree, website development kits often makes the pages much larger. 7. Certainly, but this shouldn't be necessary if you have good cache-headers.

One thing that was not mentioned, was ensuring that static items are cachable by the browser. This has a huge impact.

DaniloDias• 6 years ago

It’s pretty bold to say #2 is irrelevant. I don’t have data to point to, but anecdotally I believe I have perceived the performance impact of node pages over static pages. Do you have data to support your claim? He’s clearly running in constrained hardware.

ldoughty• 6 years ago

7 is CDN, and is necessary in the case he described shortly before -- a "hot article". Presumably, a hot article will not get lots of repeat traffic from the same visitor (sure, someone might browse, but you're probably getting 90% one-time visitors). Cache headers do nothing here.. a CDN is the only viable solution... And frankly, using CloudFront for 3 years at work, I started putting my own websites behind a CDN because it costs pennies to do so.

This does not mean I disagree with your other statements, I too found it a mix bag of somewhat obvious or slow-server specific (not just low-bandwidth)

FemmeAndroid• 6 years ago

2. Static vs Dynamic webpages are irrelevant, if the pages themselves are small. Dynamic of course incurs some CPU on the server-side, but that is a machine not bandwidth issue.

Huh? Sure, it's not a bandwidth issue, but the article is about more than serving on low-bandwidth. It's about using limited hardware more generally.

From the first two sentences:

The cheapest way to run a website is from the home Internet connection that you already have. It's essentially free if you host your website on a very low-power computer like a Raspberry Pi.

I guess the headline refers to bandwidth, and there's some bandwidth-specific framing, but the article is discussing more than just low-bandwidth situations.

xrisk2• 6 years ago

doesn’t putting CF in front of your home web server mostly solve this problem? CF will cache static assets for you and take all the pain of a traffic surge away.

also prevents leaking your home IP address.

fareesh• 6 years ago

For the kind of site described here, there are plenty of CDNs which will just treat it as a rounding error in terms of their running costs, if at all it costs anything, and give it to you for free

rakoo• 6 years ago

To go along the self-hosting crowd, the whole decentralized web with alternatives to HTTP is solving issues like uptime and low upstream bandwidth by distributing distribution itself, the way bittorrent does. Dat (via beaker browser) and zeronet come to mind.

Contrapoint: content must be static

scalableUnicon• 6 years ago

Somewhat unrelated but, there are some WordPress themes that are trying to keep the bytes sent minimum. One such example is: https://sustywp.com/ and there's an excellent article by its author: https://blog.jacklenox.com/2018/06/04/delivering-wordpress-i...

vwcx• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I admire this guy's drive.

The ideal world is one where environmental sustainability and server efficiency are hand in hand like this.

aloukissas• 6 years ago

Or, you know, use netlify or vercel and get all of that out of the box without thinking about it :)

justusthane• 6 years ago

Sure, that’s an option. But being able to do it yourself is also cool, especially if it’s a hobby. That’s what hacking is about.

throwaway55554• 6 years ago

What are some good ways to isolate that server from the rest of your LAN?

timbit42• 6 years ago

Routers.

TedDoesntTalk• 6 years ago

This reads like a list from the 90s and first decade of the 21st century to optimize page load times. It’s nearly identical.

sT370ma2• 6 years ago

I am enjoying reading everyone's comments. There is a lot here for me to think about. Thank you!

Ecco• 6 years ago

Item #9 (use a CDN) is pretty much the exact opposite of the title (serve from home connection)...

jaimex2• 6 years ago

Yup. If you're going to do that just host the entire thing on github pages and call it a day.

eitland• 6 years ago

Note that the author specifically mentions this and writes about using it for new posts and then falling back to selfhosting.

That way you can own your data and serve more visitors.

jonplackett• 6 years ago

The pink background on this site really screwed with my eyes. It was like my brain was constantly trying to white balance correct it.

BenjiWiebe2• 6 years ago

I know, after I read a couple articles on it, and switched back to my HN app's white background, the white looked very cyan for a while.

pvillano• 6 years ago

Shameless plug for my 8kb website (if you don't include the 30x larger pdf of my resume).

S3 hosting + Cloudflare SSL free tiers

https://saej.in/

fortran77• 6 years ago

Use the CloudFlare free tier, too!

delduca• 6 years ago

I use cloudflare argo tunnel for this.

nickdothutton• 6 years ago

After making a rare popular post (32K hits in a few hours) I moved my static site (a gohugo.io effort) to AWS Lightsail. For less than a fistful of dollars per month it’s someone else’s problem. I keep page size down (it’s text heavy) and so far I haven’t needed any CDN.

If I’m having trouble viewing a page on someone’s hammered server I either look in Google’s cache or use links/elinks to grab the text (usually what I’m interested in).

j0057• 6 years ago

I feel a lot of people are missing the point of self-hosting here. Do we really want to run everything under the sun in three big cloud providers?

fouric• 6 years ago

The SSL handshake alone can take as long as a third of a second.

Is this true? If so, then it's a good reason for me not to enable SSL/TLS on my sites that don't need it (e.g. read-only documents or blog posts).

forty• 6 years ago

All websites need SSL, even if the content is not sensitive. Someone could inject something like "I'm raising money for a charity, send money >>HERE<<, thanks!" and people that goes on your non sensitive website could get tricked. That's just a simple example, but a more competent attacker would also use your unencrypted traffic to inject malicious code that target some browser vulnerability, or make the visitor download a malware, ...

labcomputer• 6 years ago

What's to stop an adversary from modifying the page in-transit to load malicious javascript?

ex3ndr• 6 years ago

It could take much longer. Ping between US and EU is ~100-150ms. If TLS is an old one with 3 round trips it is a full second.

wongarsu• 6 years ago

A single ping to the other side of the earth takes a theoretical minimum of 133ms, and more realistically about 300ms. An SSL handshake has to exchange data twice (thrice?), so even without processing delays at all we easily get a third of a second or longer if you're far enough away.

That said, SSL is useful on read-only documents: it provides integrity. Without SSL anyone between your server and the end user can just change the page content, whether that's for misinformation, false-flag-attacks, inserting malware, scanning for censored content (which is known to happen) or for inserting ads (which also happens).

superkuh• 6 years ago

your website may occasionally miss potential traffic during "high-traffic" periods.

The thing with personal home websites is that there's really no actual problem if the site gets overloaded, or if it goes down for a day or a week or is only up intermittently at all.

These requirements of constant availability and massive scaling aren't universal requirements. It's okay if a wave of massive attention is more than your upstream can support. If people are interested they'll come back. If they don't it's fine too.

joenathanone2• 6 years ago

My ISP (Cox) doesn't allow inbound traffic on port 80. Anyone know any tricks of getting around that? I'm currently using a reverse proxy on a friends server to tunnel through an alternative port, but I'm looking for a better solution.

kop3162• 6 years ago

If you're doing it to an alternative port, why are you reverse proxying in the first place?

Another option is to reverse proxy to a cloud provider that can provide a static IP.

joenathanone2• 6 years ago

The reverse proxy is a work around so I can use port 80, I have my web address point to my friends server which reverse proxies to my home server, masking the alternative port to the user.

agustif• 6 years ago

lowtech magazine [1] is an amazing example at sustainablity serving a website, they use solar powered only infra and the website is only available theoretically, if there's been enough sun to power the servers that day (In Barcelona, at least we've sun much of the year)

[1] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com

How to Serve over 100K Web Pages a Day on a Slower Home Internet Connection

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