[Novalug] Spamcop / mxtoolbox

Peter Larsen peter@peterlarsen.org
Thu Jun 27 22:18:13 EDT 2019


On 6/27/19 9:47 PM, Roger W. Broseus via Novalug wrote:
> 1. After all of the discussion of email, security, etc,, and, not to
> mention direct questions, I still am totally lost about judging the
> hosting service that I use for my personal needs, bluehost.com! (I am
> *not* addressing hosting of novalug.org in this context - the two
> separate needs became entangled in some peoples minds.)

The problem with choice, is choice. Ever since the internet was
commercialized (ie. you bought access through ISPs) we've had more
offerings that you could count. A good solution yesterday is today's bad
solution etc.  Add that a "web site" isn't really something that means
the same to people, it gets really complicated/confusing if you're
really not sure what you're looking for.

Here's the challenge in your case - the site you have is static pages.
The popular hosting sites are way past the stage where you uploaded
files that made up a web-page, instead you use their tools to build
sites online - no longer needing to "code" the pages yourself. For the
non IT person, this is definitely the way to go.

There are options for the "file based web-pages" but there are getting
rarer. Or at least, you have to know what to look for, as the service
providers don't really advertise this.

For instance, take Amazon's AWS. It was mentioned on this thread that a
simple S3 bucket could be used to create a website, but I don't think
anyone elaborated. Take a look at this writeup to get a better
understanding of what this is:

https://medium.com/@kyle.galbraith/how-to-host-a-website-on-s3-without-getting-lost-in-the-sea-e2b82aa6cd38

This is a way to store your files directly on Amazon and without running
a web-server, the files can be accessed by the world just as they would
any web-server. This is very close to the old idea of using FTP to put
your files in $HOME/public_html - except you don't interact with a
server at all. You simply copy your files to the bucket and that's it.
No more is needed (after the bucket is configured when you create it).
You end up paying just for the bytes your files take up and for the
network traffic which is pretty much how most providers bill you. They
either cap your bandwidth or bill you based on the consumed bandwidth.
See more details in the link above how to calcuate a cost for a simple
S3 website. It's much cheaper than trying to run even a tiny host on AWS
to just run a web-site. And this offering seems what you need to look at.

Some years back Doug Toppin had a very interesting presentation where he
showed how you could generate static web-pages based on dynamic content.
Doing this would allow you to do a daily "update", let's say you have a
small script that retrieves today IT news related to Linux, and creates
static pages out of it, which you then do an automated daily update
with. You can still use S3 because you update simple static pages. It
means much higher security too, easier debugging and a lot more
advances. Static web-pages are thrillfully simple compared to the mega
CMS sites like Drupal - at least when it comes to the system administration.

Back to your initial post. It's been my understanding that where hosting
the site was already decided and John was running it. All that's needed
is a DNS change so the site responds by name instead of IP. This needs
to be done regardless of what provider you pick.

Because cost is going to be key here, I would use that to evaluate
providers. If you have to pay for the advanced web-site where you
develop site and content using your browser, you usually pay a lot more
than the cost of hosting a simple static file web page. But they may be
hard to find. The disadvantage is of course, that if you decide that
dynamic features are needed at some point, it's a much bigger change.

> 
> 2. The "unpacking," discussed below, is interesting and edifying but I'm
> still hanging. Add to that, there are two branches to hosting that are
> of concern to me.
> 
> RIch spoke eloquently about email. But, what about hosting of web pages?
> Of course there's the assertion that if a crappy job is done on the
> email end, one may logically assume by extension, that hosting of web
> pages also suffers.

A lot of what Rick was talking about is security. And that applies to
web-sites too. So if you are talking about running your own host in the
cloud that runs a web-server, and that web-server isn't properly
secured, bad things can happen and a lot of what Rich explained that he
does to mitigate those risks can be applied to a web-server as well. In
particular if you allow dynamic pages to be created.

> 3. In the end, poor suckers like me wonder and suffer without answers.
> I've investigated panix but they are presently out of my ball park,
> cost-wise.

Cost is what I would use to evaluate. If it's going to be 100s of $$$ a
year that's way too much for a small site. In the olden days where we
used FTP, it was very common to use a single server to host multiple
web-sites to spread out the cost - so if someone (John?) already runs a
web-server that's proberly secured, it could be used without a huge
additional cost. I don't think anyone expects thousands of hits a day on
the novalug site (it would be nice though) so network bandwidth
shouldn't be an issue from a cost perspective.

> 
> 4. Final thought: people like me pose quieries on mailing lists such as
> these. The discussion goes off on multiple tangents, leaving the
> original issue unanswered. (That's why I'm doing a follow-up post.)

I would suggest that you and others that feel like the question was
"missed" speak up like you do here, perhaps a bit earlier. We often
loose the sight of the forest as we focus on the trees.

-- 
Regards
  Peter Larsen



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