I was a webmaster back in the days when one could debate cern vs ncsa and which provided a better server and for a while, I ran my own web servers at home on some static IPs from Speakeasy...
The issue is that the complexity of the modern systems have gone beyond what one person can keep in their head and maintain. This is doubly true when one considers the amount of time investment to keep on top of patches and CVEs.
The simple servers are still there. Grab a web server and put static files for it to be served - but people don't want that. They want a fully functional web application with persisted data with a maximum outage window less than the duration of a good night's sleep.
Those things aren't easy. Keeping a few servers up and running and the databases behind them backed up and the servers load balanced with failover so that if one of them goes down you don't need to wake up at 2am to fix it.
Making a Raspberry Pi web server in a box wouldn't be too hard. Put it on your home network. Open up your device on the home network (note: if the home network isn't to be opened up, advanced network configuration to establish a dmz or putting the device external to the internal network is needed) to the world.
And then you've got to find some way to keep that device patched and the ISP not unhappy with the traffic you're getting when your home blog page shows up on HN.
For me, even imagining the work that I'd need to do to my home network to set up that... I can't see it making sense anymore to get what I could get by creating a GitHub pages site and doing it there - and then I don't have to worry about all the other parts of my home network.
While I can't find my copy of it now, I have a memory of reading a quote from Ansel Adams about the darkroom and that it was a necessity for photography - but he'd rather be out there taking photographs than in the room making the print.
So too, I would rather be writing a program or writing a blog post than dealing with maintaining the infrastructure that maintains that. There are too many concerns and too many things where I know that I don't have deep enough knowledge anymore to keep a modern web server in my home network secure when facing the world.
Consider all the people on HN who are skeptical of having an Amazon echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod because they're concerned about a small appliance from a company on their network is possibly listening with an open microphone but only communicates to one Big Tech server... imagine a device on the network that is accepting all incoming traffic and talking to anyone who listens.
Spin up that server as an instance on AWS instead and then the worst that will happen is you'll rack up a large bill when it's compromised and someone runs a crypto miner on it.
> The issue is that the complexity of the modern systems have gone beyond what one person can keep in their head and maintain. This is doubly true when one considers the amount of time investment to keep on top of patches and CVEs.
I dislike that this myth keeps getting thrown around. I’m not the brighest person around but the state of my self hosted applications, be it config, patch level, etc is probably the easiest part of running them. Configs aren’t archaic like they used to be, OS patches itself when setup, and everything just works. I somehow manage to run this, with a busy work schedule, a busy home life and a 2 year old who just wants my attention all the time.
Hosting and keeping home intranet things up and running isn't too much of an issue.
Hosting and running a 3rd party instagram clone on my home intranet that is available to the outside world isn't something that I'd be comfortable doing.
On the other hand, the bluehost Wordpress instance keeps itself nicely updated. I'm ok with that. Likewise, the GitHub pages site is out there and I don't even have to slightly think about that one.
The difference between the home intranet and home hosted intranet available services is a significant distinction for me.
I wouldn't be comfortable running home hosted intranet available solutions for anything. Nor would I want my parents or siblings to be running such.
I shudder to consider how many home networks were compromised with Minecraft systems last month... and how many are still vulnerable.
While you and I may be practicing safe and reasonable network policies and staying up to date with vulnerabilities for services running on our systems - that level of technical understanding and responsibility isn't something that is commonly found in the general populace.
I would be hesitant to suggest that people should be hosting their own services on their own networks and without a managed solution.
> I was a webmaster back in the days when one could debate cern vs ncsa and which provided a better server and for a while, I ran my own web servers at home on some static IPs from Speakeasy...
I fired up my first httpd when the current chair of UWashington CS&E was pissed off about a NYT article on how physicists were building this new-fangled computer network thing. So we have that in common ....
> The simple servers are still there. Grab a web server and put static files for it to be served - but people don't want that. They want a fully functional web application with persisted data with a maximum outage window less than the duration of a good night's sleep.
That's actually what most people who've ended up posting pictures on Instagram and blogging on Wordpress want. They need something one or maybe two steps up from a static site. Essentially, something like Squarespace but self-hosted.
> And then you've got to find some way to keep that device patched
Most linux distros can do a perfectly reasonable job of this already.
> For me, even imagining the work that I'd need to do to my home network to set up that
That reflects the incredibly limited work that has gone into making self-run servers easy, stable and correct over the last 25+ years.
> a quote from Ansel Adams about the darkroom and that it was a necessity for photography - but he'd rather be out there taking photographs than in the room making the print.
The difference is that we've have the capability to change the analogy stand-in for the dark room so that you have to spend almost no time on it at all. We haven't done it, because we took the path towards server-hosting companies and left the software to be as technical and fussy as almost anything out there. Adams would likely have been entirely fine with spending 15-30 mins a month in his darkroom.
> imagine a device on the network that is accepting all incoming traffic and talking to anyone who listens.
What web server does this? If such a machine was the only solution, then I'd agree with you - this would be a catastrophic issue. But we really don't use such systems anywhere and certainly would not do so for a toy-level home appliance.
> Spin up that server as an instance on AWS instead and then the worst that will happen is you'll rack up a large bill when it's compromised and someone runs a crypto miner on it.
The issue is that the complexity of the modern systems have gone beyond what one person can keep in their head and maintain. This is doubly true when one considers the amount of time investment to keep on top of patches and CVEs.
The simple servers are still there. Grab a web server and put static files for it to be served - but people don't want that. They want a fully functional web application with persisted data with a maximum outage window less than the duration of a good night's sleep.
Those things aren't easy. Keeping a few servers up and running and the databases behind them backed up and the servers load balanced with failover so that if one of them goes down you don't need to wake up at 2am to fix it.
Making a Raspberry Pi web server in a box wouldn't be too hard. Put it on your home network. Open up your device on the home network (note: if the home network isn't to be opened up, advanced network configuration to establish a dmz or putting the device external to the internal network is needed) to the world.
And then you've got to find some way to keep that device patched and the ISP not unhappy with the traffic you're getting when your home blog page shows up on HN.
For me, even imagining the work that I'd need to do to my home network to set up that... I can't see it making sense anymore to get what I could get by creating a GitHub pages site and doing it there - and then I don't have to worry about all the other parts of my home network.
While I can't find my copy of it now, I have a memory of reading a quote from Ansel Adams about the darkroom and that it was a necessity for photography - but he'd rather be out there taking photographs than in the room making the print.
So too, I would rather be writing a program or writing a blog post than dealing with maintaining the infrastructure that maintains that. There are too many concerns and too many things where I know that I don't have deep enough knowledge anymore to keep a modern web server in my home network secure when facing the world.
Consider all the people on HN who are skeptical of having an Amazon echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod because they're concerned about a small appliance from a company on their network is possibly listening with an open microphone but only communicates to one Big Tech server... imagine a device on the network that is accepting all incoming traffic and talking to anyone who listens.
Spin up that server as an instance on AWS instead and then the worst that will happen is you'll rack up a large bill when it's compromised and someone runs a crypto miner on it.