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Comment by steivan | Hacker News Reader

I've been a long-time Glitch user and am now looking for good alternative platforms. My primary use case involves online coding with a Node.js backend using Express and some React apps. If anyone has recommendations, I'd greatly appreciate it.

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Me and a buddy built https://pico.sh to make it easy for developers to prototype and share their projects. In particular we have a static hosting service (https://pgs.sh) and a tunnel service (https://tuns.sh) that should cover most apps in the prototype phase.

Thank you for building the pico services. I use pgs for hosting my simple static website, and prose to host my blog, and it’s just such a wonderful experience.

Also it’s been a while since I mailed a check to pay for anything, let alone an online service!

It's not nearly the same experience, but I'd argue a bit nicer of one, I'd recommend giving coolify a shot https://coolify.io/

You have to bring your own server to selfhost but it's dead dead easy.

If you have a nodejs app you can basically just click "new project from github", select the repo, and click deploy. Then it'll be there on your domain (or a free one) and auto redeploy any time you push to master.

Thanks for the Coolify recommendation! After exploring several alternatives following Glitch's closure, I took your advice and set up Coolify on a freshly bought Raspberry Pi. It's been great! I've now got 4 projects running smoothly, and the deployment process is straightforward and exactly what I needed as a replacement for Glitch.

Really appreciate the suggestion. Couldn't be happier with the setup!

Glad it's working for you. If you run into any rough edges please do report on GitHub. They're quite responsive to feedback and releasing updates every week

...are you averse to just doing this stuff over a cheap VPS? Here's an affiliate link if you're interested.

    1 GB RAM KVM VPS
    1x vCPU Core
    1 GB RAM
    20 GB SSD
    2 TB Bandwidth
    Price: $10.96/Year

https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=2502&pid=912

I don't work for Racknerd, but my business uses them for our clients. Most of them have low-end requirements. I mean that's less than $1/month right there.

  2 TB Bandwidth

That's 2TB/mo. Pretty sweet deal for $10/yr.

The problem is, having a server on the internet is painful because you have to be constantly on guard for patches - if not you'll get hacked sooner than later.

Debian with unattended-upgrades and a [weekly] scheduled restart has worked for me for a long time.

It should basically be a prompt with a default of Y on first-time setup at this point.

You are getting some pushback but you are not wrong. I thought I was being pretty careful with my DO droplet but just last weekend discovered that it had been hacked and was consorting with mysterious IP addresses in Russia and Brazil.

This was on a box that was firewalled and ssh was locked down. It was running an older kernel - that was probably my downfall.

I immediately shut down and rebuilt the droplet with a more modern kernel. It wasn't too hard because my site is (mostly) static with a simple custom service but is very discouraging to find that somebody has damaged your home project just to (I assume) make a small amount of money.

patches for what? ssh? the service i am running? the linux kernel, but only for remote exploitable issues, of which there have been how many?

seriously, it's not that hard to keep a server uptodate

This fear is way overblown - at least for the basic operating system. Web apps are much more risky. Sandbox them thoroughly.

What?

Wait what, 11 USD per YEAR? How.

https://lowendbox.com/

Lowendbox has lots of cheap shared VPS providers. For small projects that's all you need.

Run iostat -c 1 and keep an eye on %steal column. IME these cheap VPS cannot be used for anything where response time is a factor. It's fine for static content if you put cloudflare CDN in front of it.

Low volume, low resource usage is definitely the best use case for these things. Yeah, you can get a bit more out of them with CDNs or maybe even just some caches.

I pair program JS-based games with my nephew remotely using the glitch editor. In the end, it’s just static files. Can anyone recommend another place to do that? What we needed from glitch was the collaborative editing and instant update.

I could stand up a server if there’s some open-source glitch-like for just static HTML and JS.

> In the end, it’s just static files.

GitHub Pages?

I really want the collaborative editor from glitch. The hosting part is easy.

GitHub pages with vscode in the browser?

https://stackblitz.com and https://github.dev/github/dev

GitHub pages with vscode in the browser?

I've been thinking about offering some kind of independent free hosting for the last few months or so. It seems like there's some need for more free, unenshittified hosting services aimed at non-commercial projects (like Miraheze is for wikis), but I'm very concerned about the legal risks, being outside of the USA (not that it's any better in the USA right now but traditionally it was). Servers are plenty cheap now, but lawyers aren't.

Is it more small temporary projects you need to make and throw away, or large projects you keep working on?

I'd recommend, unfortunately, buying a cheap $200 netbook and running cloudflare tunnel on it. As long as you're relying on other people's computers for hosting you'll keep looking forever

My vote for doing this is to get a second hand Lenovo/HP/Dell mini pc.

They're cheap (thanks to corporate upgrade cycles and the sheer number of "obsolete" models that are out there on eBay et al.), quiet, reliable, low power consumption, and generally pretty capable for the money.

> As long as you're relying on other people's computers for hosting you'll keep looking forever

> running cloudflare tunnel

There's some irony here.

The Cloudflare dependency is for networking, not hosting. It would be very impressive to see a self-hosted service available over the internet without introducing a 3rd-party dependency or two.

Yes, but my point is that there are many web hosting services, but only very few such proxy services to my knowledge. (Tailscale is another great option if you don't need public reachability.)

I don't think it's a great tradeoff, when optimizing for independence of specialized solutions at least.

Sorry, yes —¹ I was just gently poking you about the idea of self-hosting outside of one's local network without many 3rd-parties involved.

BTW, Tailscale Funnel²³ (in beta) does provide public reachability! ² https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel ³ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpxmfpCl20c ¹ Please enjoy this hand-typed em-dash.

Oh, nice, I vaguely remembered them doing something in that area but forgot about the details. Thanks for the reminder and the artisanal typography :)

More than a few: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

has the internet really changed that much?

Generally, I'd say so – life behind CG-NATs can be hard for non-eyeballs.

But fortunately IPv6 is maybe finally happening, which solves many of the NAT problems, and in the meantime there's clever things like Tailscale.

I'm only suggesting it because calling my ISP and asking for a static IP + an open port is a hassle. It's only a way to forward ports

That's nearly 20 years of lowendbox provider annual payments for what this guy is asking for.

Or even more years of GCP/OCI free tier VMs.

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu...

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Workloads allowing, sub £50 SBCs like Banana Pi might do?

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