I am really let down every time I see people giving in to the NSA’s pet-project for circumventing web traffic encryption that is Cloudflare. I hope I’m not the only one extremely alarmed by Cloudflare’s origins and obvious implications if you have seen the Snowden leaks.
A very simple VPS on Hetzner with 40GB disk space and 20TB traffic (easily enough for the author’s case) costs like 4,51€/month. It also includes DDoS-protection. If you do not need custom server software, 10GB web hosting cost 2,09€/month.
Yeah the “move to CloudFlare because it’s free!!!!” caused me to eyeroll really hard, and then I recognized that the problem is just going to grow. Can we stop supporting CloudFlare? Please?!?
I guess the first thing is realizing that you probably -don’t- need that in the first place. But if you do - personally, I’m using Cloudfront for some of my things that /do/ require a bit more caching and distribution, and I fit neatly into the free tier for that. I think when CDNs do become a concern, a paid one is probably worth it.
I don’t know if Vercel is a Cloudflare CDN reseller or if they’re an AWS CDN reseller, but their free tier offers 100GB of bandwidth a month. I switched from a VPS to Vercel when UNIX sysadmin stopped being a fun hobby for me.
The first link in the lobsters search results makes clearest accusations, especially the last two sections of the page. These are clearly stated, and link to sources. They have the same rhyme as other accusations. See earlier history on wikipedia: Room 641A, PRISM, e.g.
ssl removed here sketch
This is a weird place to make that case. The OP is just hosting a public static website with a few technical articles. Unless you’re suggesting that the NSA is man-in-the-middling this encrypted traffic to some nefarious purpose, I don’t see the concern.
It’s pretty easy with an actual VPS (which is not much more expensive). Push to the VPS, have a post-receive hook there which forwards to your actual git host and does a deploy.
Or you can convert your large losslessly-compressed photos from png files to jpg’s and and they’ll be about 22% the size. Or use webp and they’ll be less than 7% the size.
Any particular reason one would want scraping protection? It’s publicly accessible content anyway, and it’s not a massive data trove you’d want to protect from the comeptition
I basically only want email obfuscation and to avoid other websites using images through direct links to my website. The first one is nice to have, but I am still thinking if the second one is worth it.
Ha, I thought this was going to be a case of preempting pretentious arguments. I’ve done that before. On my last blog post[0] I asked ChatGPT to be pedantic and attempt to criticize the article.
I didn’t ask it to do it in the style of an HN post, I probably should have.
Anyway, I’ve hit HN front page before but nothing crazy. Github pages hasn’t ever failed me, kinda ‘just works’. But I’ve never put high res images in either. This was interesting, thanks.
I am really let down every time I see people giving in to the NSA’s pet-project for circumventing web traffic encryption that is Cloudflare. I hope I’m not the only one extremely alarmed by Cloudflare’s origins and obvious implications if you have seen the Snowden leaks.
A very simple VPS on Hetzner with 40GB disk space and 20TB traffic (easily enough for the author’s case) costs like 4,51€/month. It also includes DDoS-protection. If you do not need custom server software, 10GB web hosting cost 2,09€/month.
Yeah the “move to CloudFlare because it’s free!!!!” caused me to eyeroll really hard, and then I recognized that the problem is just going to grow. Can we stop supporting CloudFlare? Please?!?
Could you recommend an alternative CDN that offers comparable low latency worldwide, for a cheap price?
I guess the first thing is realizing that you probably -don’t- need that in the first place. But if you do - personally, I’m using Cloudfront for some of my things that /do/ require a bit more caching and distribution, and I fit neatly into the free tier for that. I think when CDNs do become a concern, a paid one is probably worth it.
I don’t know if Vercel is a Cloudflare CDN reseller or if they’re an AWS CDN reseller, but their free tier offers 100GB of bandwidth a month. I switched from a VPS to Vercel when UNIX sysadmin stopped being a fun hobby for me.
Would you have a good resource where I can educate myself about the relationship between cloudflare and the NSA?
HN history search results or lobste.rs search results.
The first link in the lobsters search results makes clearest accusations, especially the last two sections of the page. These are clearly stated, and link to sources. They have the same rhyme as other accusations. See earlier history on wikipedia: Room 641A, PRISM, e.g. ssl removed here sketch
This is a weird place to make that case. The OP is just hosting a public static website with a few technical articles. Unless you’re suggesting that the NSA is man-in-the-middling this encrypted traffic to some nefarious purpose, I don’t see the concern.
I mean, we know for a fact that the NSA is scooping up literally all the traffic they can for nefarious purposes, soooooooo.
The NSA’s data collection programs, and any nefarious uses, are wildly off topic in a discussion of static, public website hosting on Cloudflare.
If you can make the connection to have it be on-topic, by all means, please go for it.
[Comment removed by author]
Lobsters does not have downvoting. This is a feature. https://lobste.rs/about#ranking
I see. I can get behind that.
How do I set that up to automatically rebuild when I push to git?
It’s pretty easy with an actual VPS (which is not much more expensive). Push to the VPS, have a post-receive hook there which forwards to your actual git host and does a deploy.
The higher web hosting tiers even have ssh-access, making it trivial to set up push-hooks. FTP works all the time.
GitHub pages is another easy way that’s free. I’ve had plenty of posts do just fine hosted on GitHub pages making their way to HN.
Or gitlab, or sourcehut.
A simple golang server does just fine for all my blog posts that hit FP.
Depending on your hosting provider, that may have the same bandwidth cost issues as this post discusses.
However, GitHub Pages is free regardless of the bandwidth (or they may just limit things themselves secretly at some point, I don’t know).
Agreed, this or similar service by other code forges is a good option for open source websites.
GitHub Pages doesn’t require the repo to be public to work fwiw!
TigerBeetle.com is in a private GitHub repo hosted by GitHub Pages.
Nice! Didn’t know that.
Or you can convert your large losslessly-compressed photos from png files to jpg’s and and they’ll be about 22% the size. Or use webp and they’ll be less than 7% the size.
An “I put my website on CloudFlare” blog post gets the scaling tag…
Any particular reason one would want scraping protection? It’s publicly accessible content anyway, and it’s not a massive data trove you’d want to protect from the comeptition
I basically only want email obfuscation and to avoid other websites using images through direct links to my website. The first one is nice to have, but I am still thinking if the second one is worth it.
Ha, I thought this was going to be a case of preempting pretentious arguments. I’ve done that before. On my last blog post[0] I asked ChatGPT to be pedantic and attempt to criticize the article.
I didn’t ask it to do it in the style of an HN post, I probably should have.
Anyway, I’ve hit HN front page before but nothing crazy. Github pages hasn’t ever failed me, kinda ‘just works’. But I’ve never put high res images in either. This was interesting, thanks.
[0] https://insanitybit.github.io/2023/06/09/Java-GC-Rust
Double CloudFlare means it’s twice as fast, right?