Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, it's an absolute explosion of complexity, and with it comes the risk that you miss something and are faced with a security issue or giant bill or both.

What I would kill for is something in between all of this and FTPing PHP around like it's 1999. I've hunted for years for middle-ground solutions and haven't found anything. Security, cost, performance etc are important, sure, but what I really yearn for is a simple, easy, bulletproof solution like the days of yore when a handful of simple scripts could chug on for decades. Two decades ago you could set up a simple site that needed no attention for twenty years. Today's technologies require constant attention and updates and if you blink then everything requires an update that's not compatible with your code. Meanwhile, PHP from 2004 can be trivially run in 2024. What's the PHP-and-FTP of today? Does it exist?

Actually they don't, at least most of the time.

At my last shop the entry cost for hosting a single static file was around $2500 for infra, because that was the agreed upon template for a project that was pre-approved by all neccessary committees. I've tried to fixed it for quite some time, presented solution to C level, got some initial funding, but eventually after many pushbacks I died on that hill.

People like to play with toys, cv driven developement is a real thing, and when it comes to security and compliance everyone want to be sainter than the pope, just in case.

Is that $2500/month?

Have you seen https://www.val.town/ ?

tgere are far better ways but for the sake of simplicity I suppose you could ssh in to box, cd /some/dir, and git pull on the latest branch. that way atleast you have version control and can rollback quickly if you bork your site

It's still php-and-ftp. Sometimes I get fancy and use python and ssh.

I was going to say the same thing. I generally use Laravel instead of "raw" PHP these days, but still...

I nowadays mostly use a simple static website plus minimal Javascript, but I still have PHP sites.

It still works. And PHP today is at least factor 3 faster than PHP was back then — on the same hardware.

So maybe just use PHP and ftps or sftp?

> Two decades ago you could set up a simple site that needed no attention for twenty years.

...but as of yesterday, you can't?

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