I’ve been on Nearly Free Speech for years, and this is solid. What he doesn’t mention is that a “production site”, which has higher capacity limits, costs $0.05/day instead of $0.01/day. If you get enough traffic on a regular basis, NFS might ask you to move your site to “production”.
Great point! They do list “personal blogs and home pages” (that don’t generate ad revenue) as being OK for non-production status (otherwise I wouldn’t have suggested using that site type). But if you’re already using the service and have other existing sites, there is a limit to the number of non-production sites you can have (no more than half of the number of sites you have, rounded up).
Exactly. However, they also let you host multiple domains on a single production site. Bradley Taunt explains how:
Read this earlier today. I’m pleased to be hardcore :D
Yeah, we’re the IndieWeb Hard Corps. Maybe we should design a t-shirt?
NFS is good, I kinnndda wish I was allowed to run self hosted services but I don’t think its allowed ?
I think you can run daemons on NFS as long as you install them in your directory, but if something goes wrong you’re entirely on your own unless you can get help in their forums or FAQ.
Adam’s post made me register for a NFS account and now I have https://brennan.casa up and running there :D A very simple 11ty site I made that then uses
"deploy": "rsync -avz --delete _site/ brennanbrown_bren@ssh.nyc1.nearlyfreespeech.net:/home/public/"
in the package.json to transfer the generated _site to directly to my NFS server using rsync. (It uses the --delete flag to remove files from the server that no longer exist in the build output.)
I wonder if people would appreciate a separate tutorial for something like this? (edit: wrote out a little tutorial for this) Handcoding HTML has its merits, but as soon as you have a lot of pages, then being able to have default layouts and the ability modularize things like the footer and header so you aren’t rewriting them for every single page is helpful. Of course there are many ways to do this, a SSG like 11ty just being one of them.
Also maybe a comparison of the pros and cons of using something like NFS vs. Netlify (free with OOTB features like webhooks, forms, etc. but no SSH capabilities) vs. self-hosting (also free but privacy and security concerns).
Read the post and spent a large chunk of it going, “hey! This sounds a lot like what I do!”
I use PHP with JSON files rather than static HTML, but the idea was the same: I want a fully functional copy of my website on my computer, and I want to edit that copy before it ever sees the open web. I picked JSON as my data format specifically because it’s so portable and a lot of languages seem to support decoding it, so if I ever wanted to switch to a different scripting language, I wouldn’t have to remake all of my entries. I picked PHP mostly out of convenience, but also because many hosts support it.
SSGs, CMS, and other software can be very helpful, but they shouldn’t get in the way of keeping backups. Having a fully functional offline copy of my site is very important to me (which is part of why I have very strict personal policies for my site—no hotlinking, no external scripts, no places where others can submit things, writing everything myself). Working directly with the files that compose my site just feels better. And it makes things easier to maintain, since I’m not relying on others keeping important portions of it functional. Since I wrote my simple little scripts myself, if I ever get bothered by them, I know exactly how they work, so I can rewrite them easily.
NearlyFreeSpeech is a great host and I recommend them every chance I can get.
Technically, the only things they forbid directly are IRC proxies, URL shorteners, proxies, “unmoderated websites,” and BitTorrent trackers. Anything you want to host would have to work within NFSN’s environment (which iirc is FreeBSD). You could probably run something like Friendica or a forum software that is specifically designed to be on shared hosting. They have a question in the FAQ outlining cases where a VPS would work better.
Yep. Server type also has to allow it. They have instructions in their FAQ.
oh thats good to know ^^
If you decide you need a VPS, Vultr is a solid provider and provides a reasonable amount of capacity for $5/month.
This is how I deploy flamedfury.com :)
I use something similar in my makefile, but with —delete-delay instead.
right, ive been sorta planning to rewrite my site in either golang or On Rails
That’s a great guide! I would disagree with this though:
you don’t need a fancy subscription blogging service to join the IndieWeb. In fact, when you use one of those services, you’re actually taking a step back from real independence, because your content often winds up living in someone else’s database on someone else’s server.
The entire point of the article is to about putting your own content on someone else’s web server. This is unavoidable unless you run the website from a server in your own cupboard, but even then it’s running someone else’s DNS on someone else’s ISP! Where does it end?
(Note: I’m biased because I run indie blogging service Pagecord! To be fair, I do this because many people struggle with raw tech, or don’t have the time or inclination, and it’s open source, you own the content and can store local markdown and publish via Obsidian/API etc… 
)
I feel like “hosting a website” has both been easier than ever (subscription blog services exist) but in a way, also harder than ever because of the wide choice of hosts (both “managed” blog services as “plain” webspace providers).
as far as the indie web goes: pick whatever fits your level of maintenance! you can’t put rules onto independent things
I’ve been looking into hosting my own DNS, main problem is having redundancy (I don’t have budget to host a seperate ns2).
Brave!