Comment by 🚀 mbays

I wonder if we should think about distributed hosting for such things. I'm imagining something like: a handful of volunteer servers running spellbinding on a distributed file system (nfs or similar), so with common server certificate and synced user data, with dns to select which server is "live". I expect it would end up being complicated, though.

Aug 21 · 4 months ago

9 Later Comments ↓

That's hardly worth it; the whole system is well under a megabyte -- and the runtime is maybe 40KB, the rest is the dictionary to generate new games once per day.

You could pass the spent words file around to keep games unique; it's a few hundred bytes.

A minimal stable host is not really that hard, right?

I could easily spend $5 a month on a drop or amazon whatever, but knowing myself would likely screw something up, get really annoyed with some stupidity, and get ddos'ed to heck.

nfs might be overkill, some nightly cron jobs to sync game and user data would probably be enough. And two mostly-online servers might be enough. I think the complexity might be worth it to keep us independent from big datacentres. Even if this doesn't make sense for spellbinding, if anyone reading this could be interested in hosting a backup for cdg.thegonz.net, let me know.

Just for fun, a couple of us could host an instance of rqlite

And one or more instances of any small app could point to a distrbuted db.

Or maybe simpler, shared syncthing dir among a small number of people. Could solve the distributed hosts file problem as well.

I still feel strange using a distributed db for a service with 20 daily users and a couple of thousand hits...

It’s more a general solution increasing robustness of small services than a real requirement.

Like some sort of web ring but you actually cross host each others services and data to make them all more robust.

Sometimes I feel that makes sense, but then I smack myself and write a 30Kb application that requires no database administration, server balancing or an IT team, and that is actually more robust.

It just needs to be on one server that works.

I agree, everything I create for the small web is rendered into static text, no dbs, no cgi, just serving files.

But the “one server that works” problem is never a guarantee. Which is why some of those fancy redundant ideas can have their place. If it’s required. It’s usually not.

I was more spitballing about the larger issue of small self hosting, than your exact situation.

Ps. If no one else rocks up, I’d happily host. I used to run a pubnix years ago and have been toying with the idea of starting one up again.

I get it. I always wanted to run a bbs or a pubnix, but realized long ago that I'm better at writing code than keeping other people's code running...

Original Post

Apologies... I am at the mercy of the people running the server... This is the third time I am scrambling to find hosting... I hopr team comes back up while I search for something better.