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by zachruss92 2579 days ago
What I like about static sites is that you can serve the site in its entirety from a CDN. So you can literally just CNAME www.yoursite.com to yoursite.gitlab.io (or w/e static site host you use). This dramatically cuts down on latency worldwide. It also removes your web server as a single point of failure for short-term outages.
2 comments
dvfjsdhgfv 2579 days ago
> you can literally just CNAME www.yoursite.com to yoursite.gitlab.io

After so many years I still can't really understand how easily people hand over almost complete control over their site to someone else, just because everyone else does. It's like handing over your e-mail account passwords when LinkedIn started. Yes, CloudFlare, Google and others are helping you, but there is a price to pay that might not be immediately visible.

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acdha 2579 days ago
It seems pretty different from a password because you're not giving control of your domain: if they broke their contract, you could take it back at any time.

That's the other odd part about this complaint: you're trusting a company like GitLab not to break their terms of service, which is a potential factor to consider but also one where they'd have severe negative outcomes to their business if they went rogue. Since you're already trusting a number of other parties, why is this one so much scarier?

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nybble41 2578 days ago
> It seems pretty different from a password because you're not giving control of your domain: if they broke their contract, you could take it back at any time.

You are giving them everything they'd need to obtain a DV certificate for your domain, though. You can stop them from using it at any time just by changing the DNS records, but you'd need to wait at least two years (825 days for maximum TLS certificate duration) before you could be certain any certificates they had been issued before that point had expired.

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cortesoft 2579 days ago
How would you do it without trusting a third party?
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donmcronald 2579 days ago
You can get some nasty cold starts though. Here's a domain I have that doesn't get any traffic (literally zero):

https://imgur.com/a/dVPQYKC

The first hit is brutal. I won't say the CDN since I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take long to go cold (minutes) and once it's cold even the cached hits are 400ms.

Is 400ms really a dramatic reduction in latency?

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