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by embedding-shape 215 days ago
Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other? Better question is; why default to using more things before you actually need them?

Personally, software engineering for me is mostly about trying to avoid accidental complexity. People obsessing about "web scale" and "distributed architecture" before they even figured out if people actually want to use the platform/product/tool they've used tends to add a lot of complexity.
2 comments
everforward 215 days ago
> Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other?

That's not really true if you care about reliability. You need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes (via DNS or a load balancer or etc).

You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to make that work, and it's way more complicated than chucking CloudFlare in front of static assets.

I would be with you if this was something complicated to cache where you're server-side templating responses and can't just globally cache things, but for static HTML/CSS/JS/images it's basically 0 configuration.

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mystifyingpoi 215 days ago
> That's not really true if you care about reliability

While reliability is always some concern, we are talking about a website containing docs for a nerdy tool used by a minuscule percentage of developers. No one will complain if it goes down for 1h daily.

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miguel_martin 214 days ago
With the uptime guarantees AWS, GCS, DO, etc. provide - it will probably 1h per 365 days accumulative (@ 99.99% uptime). 2 nodes for a simple static site is just overkill.

But, honestly, for this: just use github pages. It's OSS and GitHub is already used. They can use a separate repository to host the docs if repo size from assets are a concern (e.g. videos).

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anamexis 215 days ago
How is setting up a web server not using more things than you need when you could just drag and drop a folder using one of many different CDN providers? (Or of course set up integrations as you want)
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embedding-shape 215 days ago
Just because you're using a UI doesn't mean it isn't more complicated. I'm thinking "complexity" in terms of things intertwined, rather than "difficult for someone used to use GUIs".
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anamexis 215 days ago
And configuring a web server as well as the server it is running on is not intertwined complexity?

You're welcome to set up the CDN with a CLI...

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jazzyjackson 214 days ago
I'm thinking of complexity as "shit I have to pay for"
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