Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

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> If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown.

Until you have enough visitors or evil AI bots scraping your site so that it crashes, or if you're using an auto-scaling provider, costs you real money.

The problem isn't in markdown→HTML conversion (which is pretty fast), it's that it's a first step in adding more bells and whistles, and before you know it, you're running a nextjs blog which requires server-side nodejs daemon so that your light/dark theme switch works as copy-pasted from stackoverflow.

For blogs, number of reads vs number of comments or other actions that require a server is probably on the order of 100:1 or 1000:1, even more if many of the page loads are bots/scrapers.

> SSGing your personal site is the first step to handing it over to 3rd party services entirely IMO.

Why? Your interactive/feedback parts can be a 10-line script as well, running on the same site where you'd run Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Django, or whatever.

Looks like Jeff plans to do exactly that: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167

> Until you have enough visitors or evil AI bots scraping your site so that it crashes, or if you're using an auto-scaling provider, costs you real money.

There's been multiple blog posts on HN from people who've received a hug of death and handled it fine with basically free or <$10 /month VMs

A couple of gigs of RAM and 2 cores can take viral posts and the associated bots. 99% of personal websites never go viral either.

> The problem isn't in markdown→HTML conversion (which is pretty fast), it's that it's a first step in adding more bells and whistles, and before you know it, you're running a nextjs blog which requires server-side nodejs daemon so that your light/dark theme switch works as copy-pasted from stackoverflow.

This is my exact argument against SSGs, and Jeffs post proves it: it's easy to use SSG to generate web pages, but the moment you want comments, or any other bells and whistles, you do what Jeff's going to have to do and say you'll do it later because there's no obvious easy solution that doesn't work against and SSG.

> Why? Your interactive/feedback parts can be a 10-line script as well, running on the same site where you'd run Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Django, or whatever.

EXACTLY! This is my point! Why not just SSR the markdown on the server you're already running?!

This is the opposite of what Jeff and 99% of other SSG users do, they switch to SSGs to get rid of dealing with servers, only to realise they need servers or third parties, but then they're sunk-cost-fallacied into their SSG by the time they realise.

You seem to think an SSG is some burden that people put up with due to sunk cost fallacy, but I don't see why.

The Markdown-to-templated-HTML pipeline code is the same whether it runs on each request or on content changes, so why not choose the one that's more efficient? Serving static HTML also means that the actually important part of my personal webpage (almost) never breaks when I'm not looking.

"Markdown-to-templated-HTML" is only 1 part of a website.

SSGs force people into particular ways of doing all the other parts of a website by depending on external stuff. This is often contrary to long term reliability, but nobody associates those challenges with the SSG that forced the external dependencies.

It becomes a sunk cost fallacy because people do what Jeff has done, they switch to an SSG in the promise of an easier website and proudly proclaim they're doing things the new best way. But they do the easy SSG bit (the content rendering) and then they create a TODO with all the compromised options for interactivity.

When they've got to a feature complete comparison, they've got a lot more dependencies and a lot less control/ownership, which inevitably leads to future frustrations.

The end destination for most nerdy personal website is a hand crafted minimal server with minimal to no dependencies.

How many RPS is a hug of death?

I was thinking of this blog post when I wrote that: https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death

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