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A huge advantage of GH / CF is that your site has a strong chance of outliving you, if that's something you care about.

If you're self hosting, either at home or on a VPS, you have to worry about domains expiring and credit cards being cancelled, which is inevitably going to happen if you don't have a succession plan in place. You could probably solve it with a bunch of lawyering, but that's expensive.

Free services don't have this problem. They can still go away, it's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a "might" versus a "definitely will"

When you pay for something, you stop being the product and become the customer instead. That's a big deal.

Same, but with GitLab pages.

I do the same for my blog [1]

[1] https://gigatexal.blog

+1. Why even pay the penny? Spinning a onion service is trivial...and...more secure than the clearwebz.

I've made a few easy to spin up services. Heck, you can even run it off your phone.

Nanogram https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/nanogram

Spreadsheet Server https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/spreadsheet

Library Server https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/libraryserver

Torum (HN Clone) https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum

> You could even go to your domain provider and have one of your domains redirect to your .onion address so people don't need to memorize it.

Apparently [1] there are also ways that Tor Browser supports, for directing visitors to the onion address via the “normal” internet:

- Onion-Location

> The Onion-Location method was introduced on Tor Browser 9.5 as a way for service operators announce their Onion Services in their regular HTTPS sites. It's specified under tor-browser-spec's Proposal 100 - "Onion redirects using Onion-Location HTTP header".

- Alt-Svc

> Similar to Onion-Location, the Alt-Svc method also uses an HTTP Header (the Alt-Svc Header, specified by RFC 7838), which means that the user first need to access the regular site before their browser discovers the alternate Onion Service address.

> But contrary to Onion-Location, the Alt-Svc method:

> - Does not support an HTML tag, as it relies entirely in the Alt-Svc Header.

> - Is fully transparent: all the discovery and upgrade happens automatically, without user intervention.

- Additionally, they also speak of future possibilities for DNS or DNSSEC-based Onion Association.

[1]: https://onionservices.torproject.org/research/proposals/usab...

Perfect is enemy of the good. Like you said, the only way to be truly independent if people ran their own infrastructure, and if all the hardware was as 100% FOSS.

Of all the compromises we have to do (relying on Telco providers, equipment manufacurers, etc), using Nearlyfreespeech is the less risky one. They have no history of abusing the trust users have placed on them, and service costs virtually nothing.

Note: you don’t need to “download the browser” to use Tor. Tor is a service, not a browser. The “Tor Browser” bundles a privacy-friendly browser with the Tor service, for your convenience. You can run a Tor site on your headless server without installing any browser at all.

Few people host their websites as hidden services because it's just asking too much from anyone who uses your site.

Imagine you are in a conversation with a stranger. You want to show him your personal website. Consider the following two sentences. Which has the highest probability of actually helping him getting on your website?

"Go to myfirstnamelastname.com. Yeah, it's spelled with a K."

"Go to $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHRACTERS.onion. Oh you need to use the onion browser. Let me help you install it on your phone. Can't find the service? Oh my bad it's actually $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHARACTERS.onion. There you go."

With port forwarding, somebody else still owns the identifier that points to your website, whether that's a domain name or an IP address.

Nah, then you're still dependent on Tor. The most independent way is to publish your blog on your own p2p network ;)

i host myself with 2 fixed IPs from telekom germany business, its not as expensive as one might expect, under 90€ for a fiber and vdsl line, so next to hosting your own auth ns servers and mail you get failover at home which is nice.

> port forwarding from your home

Not 100% independent then. You still depend on your isp.

> I don't get the preoccupation with hosting your own server

The field of software engineering is dominated by the smart people that do something not because they have to but out of curiosity.

I've hired a bunch of people and I was always looking for curiosity and drive most of all. A degree doesn't help you if you don't care.

6USD per year adds about 0.016USD per day. Definitely more, still pretty cheap.

What part of this pretty weird article proposed hosting your own server?

Considering many people doesn't know what a file is, keeping the spirit alive is important, I think.

The article was a lot of words just to say that.

It's sad that we need this new concept of "IndieWeb", as the whole Internet evolved into a monstrosity hosted and guardrailed by a handful of megacorporations. Hosting files became a privilege, when it should've been a (human) right all along.

edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only.

We are a long removed from when putting something in your public_html folder would instantly give you a personal web site. Not that I am saying people should still hand write html or anything but it was a very quick and natural way to participate back in the day. (A unix account usually gave you automatic p2p chat too using finger to see if your buddy was online and talk/ytalk to talk to them.) This was little less than magic at the time even when your friend was sitting on the terminal right next to you.

Oh, wait until the kids learn about hardware.

You have access to php and a database there.

If NFS isn't much difference from Vercel we should see 50% of people using Vercel and 50% using NFS, but we don't, they're all on Vercel - why?

NFS supports dynamic websites (giving you access to a full Linux system with many programming languages), though you’ll have to pay more.

I get your point, but I still remember that guy who got a $100k Netlify bill for his free plan.

Github Pages is free hosting with domains and ssl, no bills, and has good longevity and prospects. I don't want to worry or think about a static site, and big players like Github and Cloudflare seem to fit that best.

What’s your preference?

I also “preach” GitHub pages a lot but I’ve also written about hosting on a Raspberry Pi in my bedroom.

https://joeldare.com/private-analytics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...

I appreciate Cloudflare for keeping all the piracy sites running, though.

Or even Vercel/Netlify

From the article:

> When your posts are individual HTML files (not Markdown files or database entries), they can finally be seen as the individual web pages that they truly are. And that means that you can really lean into making all of your posts unique! They don’t all have to be cookie-cutter paper-doll clones of one another; that’s just a bi-product of modern web publishing tools and the cultural influence that they have on our concept of a “blog”. You can now go ahead and make every blog post as special and individual as you’d like. Each post can have its own personality, baked right into its HTML. Individual style, individual appearance, even individual layout. Literally everything is possible with this approach.

I have to push against this slightly.

HTML is human-readable and writer friendly. Humans - not even all of them CS students - were reading HTML,JS and CSS on websites and writing it all by hand in text editors for years before the "proper tooling" came along. It really isn't that difficult, especially if you're just dealing with simple websites, doubly so if you're on HN, you probably work with more complex languages on a regular basis.

If you really want to "learn and own a process" and be "100% independent" you should at least be able to understand and work with web languages natively.

Static site generators are nice (I use Nikola) and tools make things easier but but it's still dependency on third party tools if you don't understand or can't otherwise work with the output.

Zooko's Triangle says you can't build a name resolution system that's secure, human readable, and decentralised.

DNS is secure (in Zooko's terms - means you can be certain a domain only has one correct resolution) and human readable.

.onion is secure and decentralised.

Petnames (as in I2P) or /etc/hosts are human readable and decentralised.

Also any centralised secure system will quickly have all the names squatted if they are free. It's bad enough at current prices. For instance every dictionary word under .com is already taken. If they cost nothing it would be every pronounceable sequence of up to 12 letters.

Nothing is actually stopping you running "weird DNS" on your home network if you implement the DNS protocol towards clients. I suggest you get familiar with the program Unbound. It's very common for networks to use alternative DNS if only to address the devices on the network.

Also IPs weren't originally meant to be ephemeral. You can get an address block registered to you (v6 only of course, there's no more v4) for a pretty reasonable nominal fee.

You can’t build your own engine outside of the EU, but you can still build on top of the existing Safari engine. What you’re describing is technically possible.

However, why would a company build something just for a handful of people?

I see a lot of young software engineers who don’t realize how much you can do on your own and how simple it is.

You are clearly not the target audience. Perhaps you can recognize that other more recent internet frequenters might appreciate the knowledge.

Also the Always Free Oracle Cloud tier is pretty generous. You can spin up a VM or two with it.

Yup, I have a similar setup where I use a Wireguard VPN to tunnel traffic to a tiny public facing Caddy server, which proxies the traffic to the server under my own roof. No Cloudflare!

I have something similar. I use Cloudflare tunnels too but also their CDN which is free (for now).

That's the only thing I haven't really been able to figure out how to do on my own. Back in the day, hosting a static site from my crappy DSL connection was basically no problem and most people who were accessing my site were probably in my timezone. Now with how big the web is and how many bots there are, I worry about the quality of self hosting without a CDN.

Cloudflare tunnels are pretty cool. Do you segregate your server from your home domain too? Little weird having cloudflared on my home network. It make things a little more annoying but I haven’t bothered to fix it since I dev on the same production server.

> Cloudflare tunnels for free. I could replace that with port forwarding

You could replace it with something better, like pangolin, either their cloud or even self host it too, and that way you can tunnel to other stuff like if you have a media server where you can watch your movies from anywhere in the world.

same here, except a 5 yrs old raspberry pi hanging off a power adapter on the floor.

There's no such thing as a TLD that's uncontrollable by any entity. How would you imagine such a thing working? Whatever you imagine: how does it stand up to me editing the hosts file, or the browser's source code?

Note that most ISPs don't allow it on residential plans, but also won't stop you unless you actually create some kind of problem (no ISP actively polices it). If you're rich you can pay more for a business plan (at your home) which would explicitly allow it.

It's fine to host something for friends on a residential ISP. They don't care. If you want to make it a public website it's more uncertain. Still don't worry though, because they won't just ban you from the internet. Worst you'd get is a phone call telling you to stop it.

However, it'll also bring all the bots and "wild west" of the internet to your house when you run your web server from home, and for anyone who has a couple of spare dollars, it's a much wiser choice to run a small VPS elsewhere to weather the storm.

You need a static IP address for this to work is the downside, and depending on where you live and who your provider it it can be difficult and/or expensive.

You don't need to deter bots and crawlers. Cloudflare wants you to think you do.

Fixed IP would be a way to go. Some people pick dynamic dns server so they can periodically update if their IP changes. But IMO it's just too complicated. I don't think there's a good way to go around ISP restrictions, especially in USA.

I host my site on my own home server, but I do have a proxy ec2 server to tunnel public traffic via wireguard back to my home server. This keeps things a bit more protected and my router/home network not directly exposed. I'm also not locked into AWS, I just use them for convenience, but could get any other cheap proxy to run wireguard. No dependency on tailscale either, it's just nicer interface to wireguard. Wireguard config is like 5 lines btw.

It used to be as simple as getting a fixed IP but these days that is indeed a lot harder to get.

You can do it over TOR.