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Comment by mdekkers | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, when you host all your code with a 3rd party, and you run all your services with a 3rd party, and you depend on another 3rd party for significant chunks of your functionality, you will find that starting up is a lot easier, as long as you don't mind giving up a very significant chunk of your independence and freedom to do as you wish.

I don't understand the obsession with github, google, amazon and the like. Well, I understand it, but I don't understand why people fall for it. Hosting is dirt cheap these days, really very easy, and you can set up pretty much any environment you need in less than a day, for very little money.

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Are you serious?

Maintaining things is hard. Even for relatively simple stuff, things fall over all the time and suddenly your job is "make sure your mail server is up" instead of "accomplish your core business task". I don't have that sort of free time anymore.

Case in point: Ran update && upgrade on my server that runs a mailinabox container. Whoops, something broke and now the container doesn't recognize any of the owners or groups. Your family mail server is down while your wife is waiting on replies to job applications. Thankfully, it was fixed within a day, but I've had stressful weeks where I've considered just moving to fastmail instead of spending my limited time at home pounding on config files.

Same here, Ubuntu dist-upgrade updated Apache, now none of my configuration works anymore and I need to figure out how to make the LAMP stack work again.

The old shared / virtual hosting was easier and a bit cheaper in that respect, but at the same time it was horribly limited (CPU limits).

...and that's why you plan and test.

For git, literally all you need is a server with Git and SSH installed.

More people need to know this. The prices of GitHub plans are hilarious; I've discussed this with paying GitHub users and they had no idea.

Yeah - I am serious. Correct, maintaining things is hard, but for the right person, it is easy. I would rather pay the right person and retain independence over being beholden to a bunch of corps that have time and time again shown to simply "end-of-life", kill due to "ToS violations" or whatever. In most cases, if you have any kind of meaningful turnover, it is also cheaper. You are happy doing what you do the way you do it? Good for you!

Mail is something I would rather keep private, and outsourced mail providers also have issues. Running a mailserver, when you actually know what you are doing, isn't difficult, and keeping it available isn't either.

Are you really trying to make this about "a very significant chunk of your independence and freedom"? Yes, when you host with people who have standards of conduct and civility, you have to respect those standards. Get over it, or host derogatory content on your own dime.

In the case of github, they can and have taken down/blocked repos that foreign govt have found objectionable. So its not the odd offensive word here and there. Luckily, git makes it easy to have multiple copies of a repo lying around all over the place.

Github asks users to obey local law. Some local law is set by oppressive regimes and is thus unacceptable to decent people.

What should Github do? Ignore rule of law? Not offer service in countries with oppressive regimes? Provide tools to avoid censorship?

And yet they're hypocrites about that: they have instructions about how to circumvent the Chinese firewall on their site, which is clearly intended to have the Chinese break Chinese laws. It's not the fact they do censorship, it's the fact they measure with two measures (?) - yes to git and fuck, no to retard, yes to removing illegal stuff, no to respecting Chinese content laws, etc.

If you're enforcing a policy, do it right.

"Are you really trying to make this about "a very significant chunk of your independence and freedom"?"

Uh, yeah - I thought that was clear, and your comment seems to make the point for me...

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