This does seem like the way to go, thanks for the tips!
Comment on Do you selfhost your own blog/website?
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
A VPS still counts as self-hosting :)
I host my sites on a VPS. Better internet connection and uptime, and you can get pretty good VPSes for less than $40/year.
The approach I’d take these days is to use a static site generator like Eleventy, Hugo, etc. These generate static HTML files. You can then store those files on literally any host. You could upload them to a static file hosting service like BunnyCDN storage, Github Pages, Netlify, etc. Even Amazon S3 and Cloudfront if you want to pay more for the same thing. Note that Github Pages is extremely feature-poor so I’d usually recommend one of the others.
Sunny@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is a bit fuzzy. You seem to recommend a VPS but then suggest a bunch of page-hosting platforms.
If someone is using a static site generator, then they’re already running a web server, even if it’s on localhost. The friction of moving the webserver to the VPS is basically zero, and that way they’re not worsening the web’s corporate centralization problem.
I preferred this advice.
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
Other comments were talking about pros and cons of self-hosting, so I tried to give advice for both approaches. I probably could have been clearer about thay in my comment though.
I have some static sites that I just rsync to my VPS and serve using Nginx. That’s definitely a good option.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Agree. And hard to get security wrong cos no database.
Yes but this can just be a drop-in frontend for the VPS. Point the domain to Cloudflare and tell only Cloudflare where to find the site. This provides IP privacy and also TLS without having to deal with LetsEncrypt. It’s not ideal because… Cloudflare… but at least you’re using standard web tools. To ditch Cloudflare you just unplug them at the domain and you still have a website.
Perhaps its irrational but I’m bothered by how many people seem to think that Github Pages is the only way to host a static website. I know that’s not your case.
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
That’s not Cloudflare-specific; you can use any CDN that supports origin pull in the same way :)
Definitely agree with this! That’s one of the pain points of “cloud” services - they really try to lock you in, making it impossible to swotch.
You still need encryption between your CDN and your origin, ideally using a proper certificate. Let’s Encrypt (and other ACME services like ZeroSSL) are pretty easy to use, and can be fully automated. I’m using Let’s Encrypt even for internal servers on my network, using a DNS challenge for verification instead of a HTTP one.
It’s strange because out of all the possible options, Github Pages is the most basic. You have to store your generated files in a Git repo (which is kinda gross) and it barely supports any features. For example, it doesn’t support server logs or redirects.
I guess it’s popular because people already use Github and don’t want to look for other services?