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by marginalia_nu 1525 days ago
Wanting to own your own web presence is reason not to host them on GitHub.

For static websites, CDNs are largely unnecessary. My potato of a website hosted from a computer in my living room has been on the front page of HN several times without as much as increasing its fan speed.

It took Elon Musk tweeting a link to one of my blog posts before it started struggling to serve pages. I think it ran out of file descriptors, but I've increased that limit now.

2 comments

Was it through a VPN? I feel like revealing my home IP to random people on the internet is a bad move.
No VPN. I have the ports fairly well tightened down, though. I'm exposed to a zero-day in iptables itself or something, but whatever. Even if someone got in it would be an inconvenience at worst. It's not like I'm making money off this stuff.
Are you able to describe how you run yours? I scummed your blog but didn’t see anything about it.
The static content is just nginx loading files straight off a filesystem. The dynamic content (e.g. the search engine) is nginx forwarding requests to my Java-based backend.
You can serve massive amount of static requests from any potato really, it's a solved problem.