[qeternity]

> This site is hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B in the author's living room (behind the couch).

Holding up quite well despite HN frontpage. I love what a bit of caching can do.

EDIT: appears I jinxed it. I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense.

[baobabKoodaa]

> I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense

When you're hosting static content (like presumably this content is; it's down so I can't say for sure), you should distribute it on a CDN for $0/year. A single VPS can be overwhelmed by traffic just as your Raspberry Pi can.

[Iolaum]

Why doesn't it make sense? After 6 months your Rpi4 will be costing less than the VPS. Plus you get the fun of actually doing it.

P.S. Getting weird RPi errors because of power supply makes you appreciate the value proposition of a good VPS :p

[baobabKoodaa]

> Why doesn't it make sense? After 6 months your Rpi4 will be costing less than the VPS. Plus you get the fun of actually doing it.

It doesn't make sense because the Raspberry Pi will not be able to serve traffic that one time when your post hits top of HN, which is the one time you really need your hosting plan to work. Yes, it can serve traffic that 99% of time when almost nobody visits your website, but if we look at % of requests served over the timespan of a year, we will see that the website was down for like 95% of users because of that 1 day of downtime.

[qeternity]

> After 6 months your Rpi4 will be costing less than the VPS.

No, $10 per year, not per month. That means the rPi payback is 5-6 years, and for inferior hardware and bandwidth.

[bigiain]

You and I clearly have different expectations for "a decent VPS"...

(I have a "One time cost access forever!" VPS, which varies me $9/year "maintenance fees", which I'm happy enough with for the money, but it's definitely "Useful for the price" rather than "decent".)

[dwild]

CloudAtCost is not a good reference for cheap VPS, they were never cheap and that maintenance fee make it even worse. Their performance is abysmal too, but that could have changed since the time I used them.

If you want some good cheap VPS, go check on https://www.lowendtalk.com/ you will find plenty of good ones there. I would suggest to pay a bit more and go with BuyVM, at 20$ per year for their 512 MB offering, but you could definitely get some cheaper just as good somewhere else.

[qeternity]

Have a look at some of the providers I mention below. I’m not sure who you’re referring to above, but as with all things, it’s a spectrum. Plenty of garbage at that price point, but also some gems.

[qeternity]

BuyVM, RamNode, FDC, Virmach (probably in that order).

[killingtime74]

Only if power is free

[notatoad]

and bandwidth. and physical space, and the ability to stay isolated from physical conditions like floods (natural or plumbing-related) or power outages caused by somebody trying to plug in a kettle.

running a commercial VPS in a datacenter has a ton of advantages, but i'm guessing that the guy with a footer like this doesn't really care about them. running your website off a raspi in your living room is cool, wheher it's the most practical solution or not doesn't really matter.

[lvturner]

I almost hate myself for writing this - but any given AWS AZ has had more outages/ performance degradations/service interuptions over the past ~5years than my home internet/electricity... and with an unmetered connection with a 200mbps+ uplink, how much more do I really need for a personal page?

Maybe a raspberry pi behind my sofa isn't so stupid?

Of course you could use multi-cloud/multi-azs, but do you really WANT to for a personal website?

[notatoad]

Maybe I'm just unlucky, but I live in a Canadian city with pretty stable internet and since I moved 6mo ago (we won't count moving-related downtime) I've had at least a 1hr power outage and 3hrs of internet-related downtime.

I can't remember the last time my little nano server in US-West-2 has been down.

[qeternity]

Properly cached, a single core on a low end VPS should be able to carry some serious weight.

But yeah, I agree. This is static content, and should be hosted on any of the gazillion free tier CDNs. But then you don’t get that warm fuzzy feeling of watching the rPi behind your couch melt into the floor.

[Waterluvian]

Unfortunately this looks like a mistake for this context given it isn’t loading now.

Otherwise, for a well-known average traffic load suitable to a Pi, a Pi is a great idea.

[lol768]

Given it's timing out for me, I'm not sure I'd agree it's holding up quite well :P

[denton-scratch]

Thecrow.uk is timing out for me; but not the DfT site.

[Sephiroth87]

Sorry for the ot, but do you have any recommendation for $10 vps?

[andrewmackrodt]

I used to browse lowendbox which occasionally has good deals from smaller companies who've been around for at least a few years but there's always a risk one day they'll sell, shut down operations or worse just disappear. However, if budget is your number one priority, you can get a years VPS hosting for low double digit dollars a year.

Nowadays a host personal projects on scaleway and netcup (EU based). I've been with the first for a could of years and the second for 6 months now, good service from both.

If you're mainly hosting static* or cacheable content, you may even get by with a raspberry pi running behind cloudflare's free plan with cache enabled. If you don't mind all traffic to your site being served by such a third party of course.

* If you only have static content, GitHub pages can be considered too.

[konart]

You can get Oracle Cloud Free for ... free.

[laurent92]

Anything with the name “Oracle” sound like the steps of a thousand lawyers entering your building…

[hvgk]

I’m using a Linode $5 running nginx for static here.

[iso1631]

$5 a year?

[qeternity]

$5/mo - but there are plenty of decent VPS for $5/yr - the catch is they will be IPv6 only for port 80 so you chuck it behind Cloudflare (carrying static load as well).

The low end world will shock anyone who has only ever seen AWS pricing.

[iso1631]

Quite, and the $40-60 a year bracket for a VPS is quite normal, but the original message was "decent VPS for $10/yr". Linode certainly doesn't go that low - at least last time I checked.

I saw an VPS from Italy I think for in the region of $20/year some time back, Sephiroth87 was after a $10/year VPS recommendation, not a $60/year one that hvgk suggested.

[pydry]

Look on lowendbox

[mandis]

Indeed, I would love to get more details on what all went into it, and how far can we stretch such a SBC.

EDIT: evidently, not far

[a012]

Unless they host their images themselves, but a Pi could handle traffic very well for a static website.

[tazjin]

HN traffic isn't that large, maybe a few requests per second.

[jacquesm]

You're a decade behind the times. HN can be formidable in the amount of traffic it generates, it all depends on the content and the time of day though.

[WithinReason]

Spoke too soon!