On: Always Own Your Platform

[gambler]

>HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites

...on AWS.

[lone_haxx0r → gambler]

Of course, no one is 100% independent. You could recursively find lack of independence:

You have your own website but its hosted on AWS

You host your website on your own servers, but they're in $COUNTRY

You have a guerrilla controlling a de facto state where your server is, but you still depend on the submarine cables.

You have a worldwide totalitarian dictatorship so you can host your website freely, but you depend on the sun for keeping the servers alive.

Your worldwide totalitarian dictatorship has mastered interstellar travel, but you're still in $YOUR_UNIVERSE.

Your scientists discover how to control the multiverse, but they're all going to big crunch eventually.

[nkozyra → gambler]

> ...on AWS.

OK, but it's trivial to move hosts, it's much harder to move from a content platform.

[old-gregg → gambler]

> ...on AWS.

so? you're not implying I'm supposed to buy land, erect my own datacenter on it and lease my own backbone connectivity just to host a blog?

I think the author's rebellion is against user-generated content, when everything you post becomes someone else's data. That's definitely not the case with any cloud hosting providers.

[quickthrower2 → gambler]

Using static hosting that can be moved somewhere else easily. URLs remain the same due to controlling the domain.

[sdinsn → gambler]

But they own the content and own the domain. If AWS suddenly dies, they'll have no problems switching to a new provider.

[tombert → gambler]

The statement probably holds true of people who self-host in their home as well. I currently run a cluster in my basement.

[dublin → tombert]

As long as your Internet connection has decent upstream speed and latency, this is still a good option. A Raspberry Pi, for cryin' out loud, is roughly equivalent to a Cray 1/X-MP, so the need for huge "server iron" to serve even fairly large sites is a thing of the past except for shared server providers who want thousands of sites per server. If your site is static and you're running off a RAM disk or SSD, then you're as fast as pretty much anything you can buy. That said, S3 or Netlify are really easy and bring CDN and redundancy to the party, and neither can really lock you in if your content generation and DNS is under your control.

[tombert → dublin]

Yep yep, I run a cluster of 5 ODroix XU4's (not radically different than a Raspberry Pi), and even doing a ton of video streaming through Emby (which I hate), everything tends to perform just find for the up-to-three concurrent users that are ever on it.

[soulofmischief → tombert]

Yes, no doubt this community has the largest percentage in both categories of "self-hosting". I have VPS's in multiple countries as well as hosting from my home.

[JoshMnem → gambler]

Or hosted by one of the large AMP caches with signed HTTP exchanges, if Google gets its way.

[diminoten → gambler]

I can't even count how many people comment on this website about how they host their own mail servers.

[soulofmischief → gambler]

Yep. Literally nothing is wrong with this. You're barking up the wrong tree.