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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

right, but curious why not use github + cloudflare pages = totally free and far better infrastructure/scaling. Also for file transfers, there's wormhole (which also handles huge files)

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Not GP, but I also run a cheap VPS to host my personal website. I don't want to depend on GitHub or Cloudflare. I don't need better infrastructure or scaling, and $5 is ~0.03% of my monthly salary, which is indistinguishable from free. What benefit is there to using a more complicated platform to host a simple website?

which is fine if you have good reasons not to depend on them (you can actually do the same kind of thing with a bunch of things) and somehow depend on whoever provides your cheap VPS instead? I have a VPS as well for bots (digital ocean), though VPS hosts containers and the containers run the bots. A decade or so ago I used VPS for websites, but now it seems a lot simpler using things like cloudflare. Thing about websites on little VPS's you have to be more concerned about patching/security etc which you can mostly automate but really need alerting then for when it goes wrong. Which all seems way more hassle.

Sure there are plenty of options out there, but its kind of nice to just have my own thing.

As far as scaling, it's apache serving static html. Even on a $5 vps it would be incredibly difficult to saturate that.

Also sometimes i just want a host to try things on and experiment with.

What does Cloudflare add over just plain GitHub Pages?

(I'm familiar with and use them both, but have never bothered putting my personal GitHub page behind CF, I'm curious to see where other people get value from combining.)

Personally I'd just use Cloudflare Pages, unlike GitHub Pages I can let the backing repo private. Maybe OC originally started with GitHub Pages and wants some analytics and filtering with Cloudflare.

> Personally I'd just use Cloudflare Pages, unlike GitHub Pages I can let the backing repo private.

What difference does this make for a static site?

honestly I would rather not have a personal website than be beholden to some big company to host it and have to worry about what random crap they would pull via some flaky automated ToS enforcement.

Pre-llm I'd say it can be more undertaking than most people care to take to move to "serverless" or "cloud native" tech. But now it's probably worth taking a crack at it.

I don't miss sshing into servers or using puppet, ansible, salt, chef.

You just listed off 3 different services, probably involves even more than that.

Bro has a single server and ssh.

what difference does that make? if you have to install 3 different things, same difference. There is no real burden in using 2 services, weird way to evaluate it. FYI wormhole is just a program https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

I've been self-hosting since 1999---first with a co-located server (perks of working at a small web hosting company) and now with a VPS. I host not only my own email and web site, but also DNS, SSH, gopher, gemini, and qotd. It's not as much work as you might think. But what works for me might not work for others.

Same, since 1999. My thoughts are if you did all this stuff before it got cloudy out, it’s already a routine that’s second nature/familiar and switching actually looks way more of an undertaking with way more risks. I could see how those coming to it later just became cloud native in a sense and never did the full admin stuff, so it looks equally risky, cumbersome and laborious

meh, but then you have to keep track of the changing landscape for not much benefit.

Meanwhile, i have been apt-get install'ing apache since i was a teenager, and it still all works the same.

lol GitHub is down all the time.

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