[TekMol]

What is the issue they are trying to solve?

It seems to be a static site. Bots should cause only a neglible amount of traffic per month. My guess would be less than $1.

And aren't there free CDNs for static sites these days? I guess you can just push the whole frontent data (html+assets) into a public git repo, put it behind a github page with custom domain and call it a day?

[jdietrich]

> What is the issue they are trying to solve?

Apparently, he self-hosts on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I guess you need to block half the internet if your server has about the same performance as a decade-old smartphone.

It's charming in a way, like someone who daily-drives a classic car.

https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/self-hosters-nightmare...

[Filligree]

> After a loss of power, my routers and web server must be restarted in a specific sequence for my home network to function properly.

There's a certain charm to Rube Goldberg machines as well.

[miyuru]

LOL, the first comment of that article.

"To worldofmathew on Hacker News,

While I do sincerely appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to post several cheapskatesguide articles to Hacker News, this may have caused them to designate you as a blog spammer and block your posts. In other words, they may think that you own this site and are posting your own articles. May I suggest that you contact a Hacker News moderator and set him straight before you post another cheapskatesguide article?"

[johnklos]

Just because there are things that we can do about symptoms of a problem doesn't change the fact that the problem itself might bother some of us.

For instance, it bothers me that certain networks quite literally do nothing about malicious actors attempting intrusion from those networks. Abuse complaints are ignored. Some people might say, "just run blocklistd", "use a non-standard port", et cetera, but the real issue is that people shouldn't be allowed to attempt intrusion, and when I send an email to a netblock's contacts with 1,000 login attempts, they should remove the accounts linked to that attempted intrusion.

They don't, so I block whole netblocks based on the lack of response and action. Should I also run blocklistd? Sure, and I do, but that's orthogonal to blocking.

So while the person running this site could do things differently and/or better, for certain definitions of better, they're doing what works for them.

Is reporting spam going to make a change in the world? No, but it FEELS better to do it, and it does affect my mailbox. Likewise, is blocking IPs making a change in the world? No, but it probably makes Cheapskate feel more in control of their server.

[TekMol]

    when I send an email to a netblock's contacts with 1,000
    login attempts, they should remove the accounts linked
    to that attempted intrusion.

What proof can you give them that those login attempts really took place?

[johnklos]

Logs.

If you're seriously suggesting that others shouldn't care because I could be making them up, then I suppose there's always vigilantism. After all, it can't be illegal if other people can't prove they didn't make up their own logs.

Are logs not real, like some people think birds and the Moon landings aren't real?

[montroser]

No, this craziness(!) here suggests that it's not a static site:

> "I added hyphens to the opening and closing PHP statements to prevent my web server from interpreting them as code."

It could be a static site, and one could also automate the job that this person spends their precious time doing every day, copying and pasting text (IP addresses) that matches a pattern from one place to another. But they seem content, so...

[TekMol]

If they read this: You can use &lt; instead of < to solve the "parsed as code" issue.

Anyhow, it does not matter how they produce the frontend html+assets. They can still take it all and push it somewhere where it is hosted for cheap or free. "wget -r 127.0.0.1" and a few more lines of code should be all that is needed to autmate it.