Your website goes down because there is a temporary power shortage.
Your website goes down because it lands on HN... but still, there is a non-trivial cost when there are no visitors.
Your website goes down (or worse: gets hijacked) because you forgot to install the newest security update.
Your website goes down because, at some point, you lose effort in maintaining it actively.
My opinion is that the best way is to host through GitHub (or a similar service). It is up, the way you want. Yet, if anything goes wrong, you still have everything, and there is little friction to push it somewhere else.
Sure, if you want to self-host as you have as a DIY project, excellent. For a reliable, safe, cheap, long-term way of sharing data, it is unlikely to be an efficient solution.
I run a small website with 5000 unique users per month (.net core, server side rendered). It's hosted on an old Banana Pi with 1GB RAM, no ups, via my home internet connection (but with Cloudflare as a proxy).
The site doesn't go down very often TBO.
- Power shortages: happens 3x per year for 20 minutes or so. The server boots up automatically after that.
- DDOS: I have cloudflare. I have the server under monitoring. I have Mikrotik router.
- Hijacking: I use a Mikrotik router on the edge which has a pretty solid firewall (+ Cloudflare). It's good to have something like that in your household regardless of your web hosting needs. It’s just a matter of paying some attention to your own internet security.
- Active maintenance: I don't do that, lol.
It's so simple to setup all of that (server, linux, docker, cloudflare, firewall), that I think everyone should at least try. And it's fun, not an obligation.
I plan to increase the amount of services I'm going to host myself in the future.
You can't go wrong choosing freedom.
Said that, I understant the hesitation someone might have when dealign with the problem for the first time. My point is that it’s worth to take that step.
PS: the overall availability of the service is good enough on my setup to not be penalized by Google's SEO platform (that's a thing if you have persistent hosting issues).
Deployment from Github makes a ton of sense for sustainability and easy switching to a different host. Direct hosting on github is also a simple answer -- limited in features, but it can work for some people. Yet Github is still a 3rd party, still owned by a large tech firm, and still suffers from the same risks as any other 3rd party host.
> Your website goes down because it lands on HN... but still, there is a non-trivial cost when there are no visitors.
A bit of optimization goes a long way, but yes there are limits. Now the question is this risk worth mitigating? I think for small sites that rarely end up on HN, not more so than avoiding reliance on GH for example.
There it is, the required "no" post.
Every case here is incompetency or laziness.
Just do the work, be a professional, and it IS EASY.
Or just be another fuckwit and cry when your work/company disappears because some powerful asshole has a selfish whim.
Your website goes down because it lands on HN... but still, there is a non-trivial cost when there are no visitors.
Your website goes down (or worse: gets hijacked) because you forgot to install the newest security update.
Your website goes down because, at some point, you lose effort in maintaining it actively.
My opinion is that the best way is to host through GitHub (or a similar service). It is up, the way you want. Yet, if anything goes wrong, you still have everything, and there is little friction to push it somewhere else.
Sure, if you want to self-host as you have as a DIY project, excellent. For a reliable, safe, cheap, long-term way of sharing data, it is unlikely to be an efficient solution.