This is a tangent, but I want to add to the less-is-more vibe!
I run some surprisingly-spiky-and-high-traffic blogs for independent journalists and authors, that kind of thing. Lots of media files.
There are two ways this typically goes: either you use some platform, and try and get a custom domain name to badge it with, or else you imagine some complicated content-management system with app servers, databases, elastic search clusters etc?
At the time wordpress etc weren't attractive. I have no idea what that landscape is like now, or even what was so unattractive about wp then, but anyway...
So we're doing it with an old python tornado webserver with one core, 256MB RAM VM at a small hosting provider. (I think we started with 128MB RAM, but that offering got discontinued years ago. It might now be 512MB, I'd have to check. Whateever it is, its the smallest VM we can buy.)
The webserver is started-if-crashed using cron minute and flock -n.
The key part of the equation is that the hosting provider I use did away with monthly quotas. Instead, they just throttle bandwidth. So when the HN or some other crowd descends, the pages just take longer to load. There is never the risk of a nastygram asking for more money or threatening to turn off stuff or error messages saying some backend db is unavailable etc.
Total cost? Under $20/month. I think domains cost more than hosting.
The last time I even checked up on this little vm? More than a year ago, I think. Perhaps two? Hmm, maybe I should search for the ssh details...
My personal blog is static and is on gh-pages. A fine enough choice for techies.
Static sites can be a fine choice for non-techies too. A non-profit I work with manages theirs using Publii, which pushes the static site to Netlify. The whole thing is free (except the domain), and quite easy to move.
Yes we probably aren't using the cheapest host in the world. It probably wasn't even the cheapest when we chose it. We chose it because I'd used them in my day job and liked their style and support. And the bandwidth throttle rather than quota is really attractive too.
And I think that more than half of the monthly cost is actually the amortized domain renewal fees etc, not the vms themselves.
So we could probably save a few dollars if we shopped around and moved? But I've just spent more time writing on HN today than I normally spend in a year on thinking about these old servers....
It's just a few dollars, but a big percentage. $20 is very expensive for what you have. You could get a $2.50 IPv6 Vultr instance, $3.50 with IPv4. 500GB traffic there. Scaleway also starts in that price range, and if nothing changed includes unlimited traffic. See https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/development/ and https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/. The domain will cost likely $1 the month.
Seeing you mentioned Tornado, WordPress not being so attractive, and $20 for a 512MB VPS makes me wonder if this was sometimes around 2010-2012? A lot of comments here seems to mention $5/mo VMs, but if this was around that time period, then I don't think $20 is unreasonable at all!
(I used RootBSD back then and they only gave you 256MB for $20 ;-)
I run some surprisingly-spiky-and-high-traffic blogs for independent journalists and authors, that kind of thing. Lots of media files.
There are two ways this typically goes: either you use some platform, and try and get a custom domain name to badge it with, or else you imagine some complicated content-management system with app servers, databases, elastic search clusters etc?
At the time wordpress etc weren't attractive. I have no idea what that landscape is like now, or even what was so unattractive about wp then, but anyway...
So we're doing it with an old python tornado webserver with one core, 256MB RAM VM at a small hosting provider. (I think we started with 128MB RAM, but that offering got discontinued years ago. It might now be 512MB, I'd have to check. Whateever it is, its the smallest VM we can buy.) The webserver is started-if-crashed using cron minute and flock -n.
The key part of the equation is that the hosting provider I use did away with monthly quotas. Instead, they just throttle bandwidth. So when the HN or some other crowd descends, the pages just take longer to load. There is never the risk of a nastygram asking for more money or threatening to turn off stuff or error messages saying some backend db is unavailable etc.
Total cost? Under $20/month. I think domains cost more than hosting.
The last time I even checked up on this little vm? More than a year ago, I think. Perhaps two? Hmm, maybe I should search for the ssh details...
My personal blog is static and is on gh-pages. A fine enough choice for techies.