Author Topic: Web hosting that doesn't suck? (Read 9519 times)

bd139 · « **Reply #25 on:** October 04, 2017, 07:32:51 am »

I could host this on AWS with S3 + CloudFront + Route53 but I spent most of my day arguing with that so I don't want to take the job home

lundmar · « **Reply #26 on:** October 04, 2017, 09:18:22 am »

I'm happy with https://www.midphase.com

Servers have ssh access etc..

bd139 · « **Reply #27 on:** October 04, 2017, 10:06:42 am »

Like I said earlier, I opted for webfaction.com. Quickly reviewing them, they seem reasonably set up with managed hosting that seems to work. However after doing some experiments their setup is clunky as hell so I'm taking the "no quibble refund".

I did an AWS cost projection to run S3 + Route53 + Cloudfront and it came out at a whopping $1.66/month. Even with 10x traffic it's cheaper so I'll go down that route as much as I hate taking work home

Brumby · « **Reply #28 on:** October 04, 2017, 11:21:00 pm »

Sometimes it's better with the devil you know than the devil you don't.

bd139 · « **Reply #29 on:** October 05, 2017, 06:32:01 am »

Problem is I know a lot of devils.

It’s all working now on AWS. Just trying to sort out deployments with aws-cli now.

manuelsoy · « **Reply #30 on:** January 10, 2018, 11:26:01 am »

I know many hosting companies in which they do a great job, personally I recommend you visit this url where there is a large list of good European hostings and with which you are sure to be very satisfied. At least from there I have removed all the hostings that I have hired in recent years. The website is this https://www.soywebmaster.com/f25/

paulca · « **Reply #31 on:** January 10, 2018, 11:40:47 am »

Have you tried your own ISP? Sometimes they offer fairly basic webhosting, either "FREE*" or for a small fee. Depending on your ISP they can be fairly reliable.

I am soon in need to web hosting and am mulling over just opening a port and doing it myself again or finding a suitable host, however I will want PHP or Python or... or... and will probably go for a cheap Free Tier or EC2 instance if I don't host at home.

bd139 · « **Reply #32 on:** January 10, 2018, 12:13:18 pm »

I have. They are Zen Internet so you're looking at £4.99 a month for a cPanel jobby.

I have solved this problem now for reference as follows. Decided to bite it off properly and it only took a couple of hours.

1. Deploy a box on DigitalOcean.
2. Point DNS at it with Route53.
3. Secure it properly.
4. Deploy nginx to it and set up lets encrypt.
5. Use rsync to copy the files to the web root.

First three steps are entirely controlled via an ansible playbook driven by a makefile. So basically even if the world catches fire or DO lose the box:

1. make box # deploys the whole thing from scratch or normalizes config.
2. make update # apply all updates
3. make deploy # update web content from local working copy.

Fuck Amazon's EC2 offerings. You run out of CPU credits applying SELinux policy on first update on the t2.micro instances.

paulca · « **Reply #33 on:** January 10, 2018, 02:22:51 pm »

Quote from: bd139 on January 10, 2018, 12:13:18 pm

Fuck Amazon's EC2 offerings. You run out of CPU credits applying ******* policy on first update on the t2.micro instances.

Please don't swear. Only thing I do with S***** is turn it off. Hateful annoying thing that gets in the way of every single thing you want to do and is even less intuitive to configure than PAM!

It's only of importance in my view if you are going to let randoms login via shell into your server

I know a lot of people use it by default, but first thing I usually do is disable it so I can get some work done.

EDIT: What are the cheap options for shell access hosting these days, asides Amazunk?

EDIT2: Actually, to hell with it. A Raspberry PI will host my website at home. It's all I need.

bd139 · « **Reply #34 on:** January 10, 2018, 02:43:53 pm »

SELinux should NEVER be turned off. If your nginx process gets compromised, it stops the attack being escalated.

https://stopdisablingselinux.com

Shell hosting with UK hosts:

1. Bytemark
2. Linode
3. DigitalOcean

hamdi.tn · « **Reply #35 on:** January 10, 2018, 02:53:40 pm »

i use OVH webhosting service for 4 years now. no problem what so ever. it's based mainly in France. from where am from(Tunisia) i pay the equivalent of 30€ / year for a simple web site hosting.

paulca · « **Reply #36 on:** January 10, 2018, 02:59:57 pm »

Quote from: bd139 on January 10, 2018, 02:43:53 pm

https://stopdisablingselinux.com

LOL.

SELinux is like giving a sculptor a pair of motorbike gloves so he doesn't cut himself. He can't sculpt either but hey ho. Also like Norton Internet Security. Of course it's secure because nobody can use the fecking internet while it's enabled.

iainwhite · « **Reply #37 on:** January 10, 2018, 03:00:44 pm »

Quote from: bd139 on January 10, 2018, 02:43:53 pm

SELinux should NEVER be turned off.

When I built my Centos7 server (internal LAN use only) I looked at selinux as a learning opportunity - I just looked at some tutorials and then worked my way thru it.
I kept a file with my configs as I made them so I had a log of changes that I could refer to, and use again if necessary.
I say give selinux a try!

bd139 · « **Reply #38 on:** January 10, 2018, 03:08:34 pm »

Indeed. Plus once you've ansible'd it, meh, who cares.

Quote from: paulca on January 10, 2018, 02:59:57 pm

LOL.

SELinux is like giving a sculptor a pair of motorbike gloves so he doesn't cut himself. He can't sculpt either but hey ho. Also like Norton Internet Security. Of course it's secure because nobody can use the fecking internet while it's enabled.

Problem is that hospital incinerators are full of limbs that sculptors accidentally chopped off.

Norton isn't a fair comparison to SELinux. Norton is the broken glass butt plug of security software.

bd139 · « **Reply #39 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:10:10 am »

Bit of necroposting there.

In the end I used Fastmail's web hosting service. That does LetsEncrypt as well and was free with my email. Job done!

Red Squirrel · « **Reply #40 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:23:27 am »

Quote from: paulca on January 10, 2018, 02:59:57 pm

Quote from: bd139 on January 10, 2018, 02:43:53 pm
https://stopdisablingselinux.com

LOL.

SELinux is like giving a sculptor a pair of motorbike gloves so he doesn't cut himself. He can't sculpt either but hey ho. Also like Norton Internet Security. Of course it's secure because nobody can use the fecking internet while it's enabled.

Haha so true. The thing I hate about SELinux is that it just breaks things without telling you why. You will spend hours figuring out why a service won't start, or why you're getting access denied despite checking your Apache config a million times or why you can't write to a samba share etc... The logs will tell you that it failed, but not WHY. Why is it accessed denied? I set all the right permissions and it still does not work, why? Then the light bulb turns on "OHHH SE LINUX!" Turn it off, bang, everything works. The idea behind it might be great, but if I wanted that level of security I would just remove the CPU out of the socket and replace it with the plastic holder the motherboard came with.

I've managed to keep my long red hair intact by disabling that as one of the first steps when setting up a new server.

bd139 · « **Reply #41 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:29:59 am »

I found it, and all the problems with yum/dnf recently, can be resolved by using Debian instead

NivagSwerdna · « **Reply #42 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:33:21 am »

I know it's already been mentioned but.... for the one commercial site I run.... it sits on Digital Ocean and just works. Took me less than a day to set up and does the Let's Encrypt magic using Traefik with very little config. I hardly ever touch it and it's been running continuously for ever.

bd139 · « **Reply #43 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:39:25 am »

I've got a node on DO as well. Very good service. Apart from outbound email which is always shit on a VPS.

NivagSwerdna · « **Reply #44 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:42:19 am »

Quote from: bd139 on May 05, 2020, 08:39:25 am

I've got a node on DO as well. Very good service. Apart from outbound email which is always shit on a VPS.

Indeed. For email I run iredmail locally on a VM on my own hardware (was HP Microserver now Fujitsu something or other). Just have to fight the spamhaus blacklists every so often when they stop trusting plusnet.

bd139 · « **Reply #45 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:44:42 am »

I did the same (postfix on the end of an ADSL line) until 2011 and gave up. Just couldn't keep up with delivery problems. The thing that killed me was a couple of people I talked to regularly were Yahoo mail stallwarts and Yahoo decided that it just didn't want me to relay to them with no appeal recourse. That was the end of it for me so I jumped onto one of the corporate islands who manage it for me.

I'm surprise you get anything out of plusnet

NivagSwerdna · « **Reply #46 on:** May 05, 2020, 08:59:43 am »

Quote from: bd139 on May 05, 2020, 08:44:42 am

...Just couldn't keep up with delivery problems.
I'm surprise you get anything out of plusnet

Works fine and I interact with Yahoo all the time. Does take love and attention though and SPF and DKIM etc... If I was going to outsource anything it would be mail but it works for me; the only downside is my server doesn't like receiving from badly configured peers... so it's a problem getting emails from the email infrastructure at equipnet! (see Auction... RF Crusty thread)

bd139 · « **Reply #47 on:** May 06, 2020, 07:52:17 am »

Quote from: cdev on May 06, 2020, 12:28:32 am

Why? don't you have everything configured properly?

Quote from: bd139 on May 05, 2020, 08:39:25 am
I've got a node on DO as well. Very good service. Apart from outbound email which is always shit on a VPS.

Yes 100% correctly. Had DKIM + SPF + DMARC set up. The issue is that the DO netblocks are shared with pretty cancerous customers on the average day from owned shitboxes to spammers. So the entire block's reputation is low. Also when you get an IPv4 address for your box it may have had 10 other terrible customers already. This means your outbound address regularly appears on RBLs which means running through their appeals. This causes delivery problems. Also for new DO customers they actually block outbound SMTP now for at least 60 days after sign up.

Sure serve a web app off a VPS but forget email.

Red Squirrel · « **Reply #48 on:** May 07, 2020, 07:02:03 am »

Yeah email is always a pain. Even on a dedicated server, as you don't know what the previous owner of that IP may have used it for. Took me years to get off all the RBLs. Lot of them also have a 3 strike policy per IP, so sometimes you can't get off at all if the strikes have already been used up by previous customers.

paulca · « **Reply #49 on:** May 11, 2020, 10:52:00 am »

Quote from: Red Squirrel on May 07, 2020, 07:02:03 am

Yeah email is always a pain. Even on a dedicated server, as you don't know what the previous owner of that IP may have used it for. Took me years to get off all the RBLs. Lot of them also have a 3 strike policy per IP, so sometimes you can't get off at all if the strikes have already been used up by previous customers.

Its just not worth touching email if you can avoid it.

I ran my own server for years. My inbound was locked to "known mailboxes" only. So when people sent spam to random@mydomain my mail server rejected them. Of course the spam was being sent from a bogus address and the host rejected my reject, even though they are not meant to. The result was around 400Mb of mail queue churning and me being added to at least one black list for "Back scattering".

So I moved the domain to Google. There are other options, but google seems to have the best antispam at the cost of some privacy.


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Author Topic: Web hosting that doesn't suck? (Read 9519 times)

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