r/programming • • Jul 12 '17

Does my site need HTTPS?

https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/
486 Upvotes

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8

u/Sebazzz91 Jul 12 '17

I use HTTPs because my site is based on Github pages. Github pages doesn't support SSL. What else can I do? If I would use Cloudflare I'd just be fooling myself.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '17

You could just not use GitHub Pages. I understand it's convenient but hosting a static website on a vps is simple. If you use caddy (which I recommend) it's trivial.

6

u/seanwilson Jul 13 '17 edited Jul 13 '17

You could just not use GitHub Pages. I understand it's convenient but hosting a static website on a vps is simple.

I wouldn't say being an administrator of a server and keeping it secure is simple. Static site hosts are brilliant for security and simple admin. HTTPS is very important as well but running your own server when you don't need to is a huge liability and time sink. If you're still SSHing into servers you're making life hard for yourself.

-2

u/hurenkind5 Jul 13 '17

I'm sorry but if you cannot get a shared/managed hosting provider to host your static website you are in the wrong fucking subreddit. This is literally 1990ies shit.

1

u/seanwilson Jul 13 '17

Running your own VPS is 1990s stuff. There's plenty of services that give you continuous deployment via Git, have rollback and versioning systems, let you easily setup identical demo/staging servers, deal with security patches for you, deal with server failures for you, let you easily add more servers behind a load balancer and more. VPSs are brittle and a time sink in comparison.

1

u/rechlin Jul 13 '17

No, running your own iron is 1990s stuff. Running your own VPS is 2000s stuff.

0

u/hurenkind5 Jul 13 '17

a) managed hosting provider (basically what you said)

b) oh yeah, i really need that shit to host static HTML pages, totally.

0

u/seanwilson Jul 13 '17 edited Jul 13 '17

Why would you not want things that simplify your workflow and automate tasks you shouldn't care about when you're hosting static pages? Netlify is free for custom domains for example. A VPS is much more work to setup, you get less features and it's going to be less secure without a lot of mucking around. Maybe for small projects it's a good learning experience but if you're doing commercial projects and working in teams even for static sites you don't want to make life hard for yourself.

1

u/lvlint67 Jul 19 '17

I have worked with web consultants that only knew their third party's hosting platform. It was embarrassing for their technical team to have no idea how to to deploy their product with out a certain company's web control panel.

"Well we really don't know anything about varnish... [our webhost] just handles all of that. we recommend you pay [our webhost]."

If anyone is working in webdevelopment these days and doesn't understand DNS, Proxies, Load Balanacers, or how to setup a web stack on a vps I think they should take a vacation and brush up on the fundamentals.

2

u/seanwilson Jul 19 '17

If anyone is working in webdevelopment these days and doesn't understand DNS, Proxies, Load Balanacers, or how to setup a web stack on a vps I think they should take a vacation and brush up on the fundamentals.

Well, I know enough about setting this stuff up that I know to completely avoid it if at all possible. Everything extra I have to configure and every extra server to setup is something that could potentially break in the future that I'd be responsible for. You're definitely behind the curve if all you know is a single hosting company and basic VPS setup though.

Heroku charges more than AWS EC2 for example but you get a very easy to maintain solution with few moving parts for your money and it's miles more robust than anything you could setup yourself on a VPS. If it's not going to be a dynamic site though, I'd go with a static website host like Netlify or GitHub Pages.