If someone is willing to use something like Hugo instead of garbage sites like Medium why not use a VPS? For many people working in tech $10/month and free are the same thing.
And yes you can have preferences to keep things simple while others can make something unnecessarily complex. For personal projects this is fine and part of learning. If you had said “I much prefer… because…” it would have been fine but you said “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” which ignores people’s subjective preference for over engineering hobby stuff for learning.
On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my situation.
At least I'm sensible and don't have an actual colo space to visit.
In the unlikely event I go viral, I'm pretty sure my server can manage serving https at 1gbps, and that's plenty. Maybe TLS is too much though, the cpus are too old for AESNI.
On GitHub?!
There's additional concern with tying your work to something like github it makes it more of a pain to pull it off and put it somewhere else.
I'm not really sure what you mean by objectively inferior. It's trade offs like everything in this field.
As far as harder, I don't really think the lift for a personal VPS is that high. Again it's a fun hobby project for most. It's fun to run your own stack.
If you want to opt into the github cloudflare goodness that's fine they're good services but I wouldn't say it's better or degnegrate others for not doing that.
That's great if that's what you want, but you are commenting in a thread full of people gleefully spouting off about decades-old installations that they self-admittedly have “no idea” how to upgrade. Most people in here would be better off if they admitted to themselves that they are not actually taking advantage of the opportunity to learn, and are instead undertaking a liability.
We're working toward the same goal here, yes.
You will never win this crusade, because there are too many people here who know from experience a VPS is neither expensive, nor under-performing up to millions of users a day, nor hard.
1. VPS costs more money. CDN is free for all intents and purposes.
2. VPS has worse availability even when run perfectly.
3. VPS requires more monitoring and maintenance.
4. VPS presents far greater security risk.
For 5 EUR you get 20 TB traffic on Hetzner.
You can put it behind cloudflare for free.
This is completely different. When it’s a person blog and a personal VPS it’s affecting nobody but that person.
Many of these small VPSs can be had for less than a couple bucks a month. Tons of popular influencers run their own machines for their blog.
insinuating that it's unsafe to run your own machine is insanity. I don't understand this mindset of being scared to run your own stuff. Especially if you're doing doing it at such a large scale there's nothing wrong with doing it with nginx and a linux box on a vps. You'll learn a hell of a lot more and be fine. At the end of the day it's a computer. We've been hosting websites since the 70's. With the advant of cloud compute is easier than every to run your own.
(edited to be less mean)
I guess if you want to call being informed about the online threat landscape "scared", that's your perogative. For me, it's common sense to avoid completely unnecessary threat vectors to my digital infrastructure, but power to you if you like dealing with extra maintenance overhead and constantly wondering whether you're providing free cryptomining to some random international criminal.
I'm also not sure that I really need a CDN for a simple blog . I'm not going to benefit from the caching as it's not video or images.
The flexibility and learning is more important for me. For example I want to aggregate HN comments and lobste.rs comments and inject that into the HTML before serving. (on the server side so no CORS or other additions)
I was considering adding additional metrics to see who is hitting the server and how at the reverse proxy level.
This is all stuff I can't really do on a github pages blog.
I see what you're saying if you want set and forget that's fine, but like I said above it's a tradeoff.
The one server I have just has 80 and 443 open with nginx. I expect it to run indefinitely with little maintenance.
I've owned and operated enough stacks e2e both personally and professionally to have gotten over the novelty. The less shit that can go wrong, the better. I sleep better at night not wondering whether any of the constant stream of IPs in my fail2ban log is wielding a yet-to-be-CVE'd zero-day, or finding out that my site has been down for 6 weeks because of some fucking stupid bug in the latest kernel patch or whatever.