| I understand where you're coming from, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and think through everything that needs to be considered for a simple, "back in the day" solution that involves apache, php, and a mysql database: 1. Provisioning the server, either via VPS or setting it up on your local machine and exposing port 443. 2. Installing Apache on your operating system 3. Installing a cert, getting it signed by an authority 4. Installing php, enabling it in apache 5. Installing mysql At this point you'll have to write your php from scratch or use something like wordpress. Assuming we want to keep it as simple as possible and write php from scratch, you'll want to consider file permissions so your database credentials aren't accidentally leaked. 6. Creating the schema and tables on your database 7. Distributing your site's static content through a CDN And this doesn't even involve automated deployments, which these services give out of the box. My point is that a "traditional" approach can appear just as overengineered and convoluted if we want to replicate the scalability, stability and security of solid PaaS services like Vercel and Fauna. I get that a hit counter is very simple, but I assume the point of this article is to provide a simple "hello world" example that uses these PaaS services, which again, provide a lot of benefits over manually configuring infrastructure. |
I think the OP’s comment was coming from a perspective of someone adding a hit counter to an app that already has app servers, etc, already in place.