Simon Willison’s Weblog

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24 items tagged “hosting”

2024

Where is all of the fediverse? (via) Neat piece of independent research by Ben Cox, who used the /api/v1/instance/peers Mastodon API endpoint to get a list of “peers” (instances his instance knows about), then used their DNS records to figure out which hosting provider they were running on.

Next Ben combined that with active users from the /nodeinfo/2.0 API on each instance to figure out the number of users on each of those major hosting providers.

Cloudflare and Fastly were heavily represented, but it turns out you can unveil the underlying IP for most instances by triggering an HTTP Signature exchange with them and logging the result.

Ben’s conclusion: Hertzner and OVH are responsible for hosting a sizable portion of the fediverse as it exists today. # 12th January 2024, 6:54 pm

2022

Stringing together several free tiers to host an application with zero cost using fly.io, Litestream and Cloudflare. Alexander Dahl provides a detailed description (and code) for his current preferred free hosting solution for small sites: SQLite (and a Go application) running on Fly’s free tier, with the database replicated up to Cloudflare’s R2 object storage (again on a free tier) by Litestream. # 7th October 2022, 5:47 pm

2020

Zeit Now v1 to sunset soon: no new deployments from 1st May, total shutdown 7th August. I posted a thread on Twitter with some thoughts. Zeit Now v1 remains the best hosting platform I’ve ever used given my particular tastes. They’ve handled the shutdown very responsibly, but I’m sad to see it go. # 4th April 2020, 5:32 am

datasette-publish-fly (via) Fly is a neat new Docker hosting provider with a very tempting pricing model: Just $2.67/month for their smallest always-on instance, and they give each user $10/month in free credit. datasette-publish-fly is the first plugin I’ve written using the publish_subcommand plugin hook, which allows extra hosting providers to be added as publish targets. Install the plugin and you can run “datasette publish fly data.db” to deploy SQLite databases to your Fly account. # 19th March 2020, 3:40 am

2019

Running Datasette on Glitch

The worst part of any software project is setting up a development environment. It’s by far the biggest barrier for anyone trying to get started learning to code. I’ve been a developer for more than twenty years and I still feel the pain any time I want to do something new.

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2016

What’s the cheapest or free stack solution to deploy and experiment with a realtime application in 2016?

Heroku have a good free tier, and comprehensive support for deploying both Python and Node.js. If you are mainly interested in realtime I would suggest starting out with Node.js on Heroku. Depending on the complexity of your project you might even be able to use raw Node.js without adding something like Express.

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2013

What is the best service for web hosting and buying a domain? Is it better to have both under one provider?

No, it’s not better to have both under the same provider. Good web hosts do not necessarily make good DNS hosts and vice versa.

[... 51 words]

What is the difference between Windows and Linux for web hosting, in other words, what are the pros and cons of each, each’s limitations, performance development environment and deployment between Windows and Linux?

Any and every operation you perform on a Linux server can be trivially automated by copying the commands you ran in to a text file. I haven’t managed a Windows server in years and I hear PowerShell is pretty great these days but an OS based around a GUI is always going to be harder to automate than one based around a command line.

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2011

The First Few Weeks—ep.io. Another take on managed Python Django/WSGI hosting, from Andrew Godwin and Ben Firshman. # 13th January 2011, 4:25 am

Hello from Gondor. “Effortless production Django hosting” from the Eldarion team. # 13th January 2011, 4:24 am

2010

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting. A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

Jeffrey Zeldman # 24th January 2010, 1:40 pm

2008

Setup mod_wsgi for Django and Shared Hosting. Tutorial by David Cramer; attached are useful comments from mod_wsgi author Graham Dumpleton. # 26th March 2008, 2:42 pm

Djangofriendly (via) Ryan Berg’s attractive new site collecting ratings and reviews for web hosts that support Django. I’m still happily hosted on a bytemark VPS, which isn’t currently listed on the site. # 26th March 2008, 8:47 am

Version 2.0 of mod_wsgi is now available. Includes features that should make Python (and Django) on shared hosting much easier: a non-root user can touch their WSGI script file to restart just their application’s daemon processes when they make changes and Python virtual environments are supported to allow different versions of packages without interference. # 21st March 2008, 1:23 pm

Troubleshooting Memory Usage. Useful for getting the most out of a VPS. # 23rd January 2008, 6:52 pm

2007

AppJet: Instant Web Programming. Another attempt at simple server-side JavaScript application hosting. Worth checking out for the impressive syntax highlighting code editor, which even matches braces. # 15th December 2007, 3:37 pm

Django GridContainer. Media Temple’s virtualized Django hosting is now accepting applications for beta testers. # 22nd September 2007, 12:01 pm

GoPHP5.org. A campaign to encourage a mass switchover from PHP 4 to PHP 5 on February 8th 2008, by co-ordinating both hosting companies and PHP projects. # 8th July 2007, 10:08 am

Web hosting landscape and mod_wsgi. Graham Dumpleton explains how mod_wsgi’s daemon mode should provide secure Python deployment for commodity hosting providers. # 2nd July 2007, 3:47 pm

Security Breach. A statement from Dreamhost. # 8th June 2007, 8:16 am

Massive Dreamhost hack, WordPress not to blame

On mezzoblue, Dave Shea reports that someone had modified every index.php and index.html file on his site to include spam links at the bottom of the page, hidden inside a <u style="display: none;">. Dozens of other people in his comments reported the same thing happening to their sites.

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Unsettling. Sounds like there might be a massive scripted hack going on against out of date WordPress installs on Dreamhost. Check your site. See also discussion in the comments attached to this post. # 5th June 2007, 9:16 pm

Nginx vs. Lighttpd for a small VPS. My VPS is still running nginx with no problems at all. # 10th January 2007, 11:31 am

2006

WebFaction blog: BIG holiday present! (via) WebFaction offer Django/Rails/TurboGears hosting for $7.50/month, allowing one long-running process and 40MB of RAM for their basic plan. # 22nd December 2006, 11:44 pm