[gwern]

> He said that because the site is so simple and low-bandwidth, his Amazon CDN bill is only about $50 a month, and it’s mostly a fun side project anyway. Its success may change that, though: After recently hitting the front page of Hacker News and being featured on Daring Fireball, he said the site’s traffic went up 100x overnight, to about 100,000 homepage loads a day. (Those are all the analytics he has, because, again, simplicity.) Since then it’s dropped, but it’s still 10x what it was a few weeks ago. At some point, he might have to put an ad on the site. But it’d probably be plain text.

Is this another case of "this would cost <$5 on a dedicated box or non-cloud VPS, and you wouldn't even notice the load from spikes"? It's a pre-rendered text page (20KB as fully self-contained HTML archive) being served at all of 1 pageview per second. It does not cost $600/year to run such a thing in 2022.

[unmole]

You can get a dedicated box for <$5? I would really appreciate any recommendations.

[throwawayninja]

https://tnahosting.net/

y'welcome. $25/year = $2.10/mo

[willmorrison]

That’s not dedicated.

[willmorrison]

No, you can’t. Maybe a dedicated Raspberry Pi from one of the services that rents those out?

[wil421]

The extra $595 a year is paying someone else to run the infrastructure and security updates.

[gwern]

When I pay Hetzner for an instance, what security infrastructure updates am I missing that is worth $595 a year? When I update the Linux OS and download the security patches, what am I missing compared to the AWS AMI of that very same Linux OS applying the same security patches? If I run a Debian AMI, is there a special supersekrit actually-secure Debian OS that Amazon gets but I don't?

[wil421]

Amazon updates their severs on your behalf. If I had a digital ocean droplet it would be up to me to update the OS and maybe Apache or whatever else would serve my text only site.

I’ve seen someone miss a Wordpress vuln on a Friday and was hacked by Saturday. Not saying all hosting companies react quickly but they at least have teams of people watching stuff. Peace of mind is a valuable thing if you have other areas to focus on like school or work and family.

[gwern]

> Amazon updates their severs on your behalf.

No, they don't, unless I am very misinformed about how Amazon VM images work. If I fire up a Debian AMI, it'll update itself, or not. (How would Amazon 'update it on my behalf'? What if it needs a reboot?)

[wil421]

The original article is taking about using Amazon CDN not a VM. When you use this hosting type style you are paying someone else to manage the underlying servers. Same with the people who use S3 or Wordpress or whatever namecheap/godaddy provides for static sites. That’s one of the reasons a VM can be $5 vs a CDN at $50 a month.

[XCSme]

Well, then go shared hosting, even cheaper, and they manage the infrastructure.

[simulate-me]

The round trip time between distant users to your VPS would be quite large though.

[unmole]

For plain-text internet, I'm skeptical RTT matters all that much.