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by andialo 2155 days ago
What do you guys do when admining a server to make it so time-consuming/bothersome?

If you just host static content you don't even need to care about security updates. Just deploy a new instance, "apt install nginx", done, forget about it. I would say less work than setting it all up on AWS.

When is the last time there was an remote exploit for nginx serving static files or in Linux kernel? You dont even need to worry about security updates in this scenario.

> I’m sure a large part is that he wants to maintain a personal account to learn/hone skills.

Yeah, he seems to be responsible for OpenShift (marketing?) at Red Hat and he only learnt how expensive AWS is when he got a bill? Bit embarassing.
1 comments
samdixon 2155 days ago
Not making any arguments about the author, but there is a bit more work to a static site than just apt install nginx. You need to make sure your firewall is setup correctly, users are added and keys managed, ssh config has correct settings, services start automatically, certificates. Either need to deal with certs on your own or get a cdn. Either way, more work than apt install
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andialo 2154 days ago
apt install nginx will set the users for you and it also starts automatically on start, ssh default config is perfectly fine, keys are set up automatically when you start the instance - any cloud provider/VPS service/even kvm with 'uvtools' does this for your (and even if not, it's one ssh-copy-id command).

But yes you need to run, for example, a certbot as well to setup certificates.

so it's: apt install nginx apt install certbot certbot certonly -d your.domain -d www.your.domain # again, when you apt install certbot it installs the cron/timer automatically for automatic certificates renewly and nginx reload

Still less work than going the CDN route I would say.

It really seems to me you don't trust default linux settings and need to take care of everything and fine tune everything but you trust CDN providers thus making the CDN route less work for you. If you trust default settings of a linux distro, it's less time consuming setting it up yourself on linux. Yes that's how user-friendly it really is today.

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