1. This tool allows you to deploy all files in your directory to your site. If you were using the API directly you’d need to deploy each file individually.
2. It was monetized in the past but Gumroad banned my account because they consider web hosts to be a risky business. I’m re-implementing Pro soon (more info: https://pro.1mb.site)
3. It just seemed like the most logical way to store and retrieve data with JavaScript.
4. It’s coded by a friend of mine but I’ll pass that feedback along! Thank you
5. Only 1 site per account. There is a 1 megabyte storage limit. I know it sounds crazy but most users don’t even come close. Pro users get 1 gigabyte.
They banned me without warning and refunded all my customers and I wasn’t impressed. After reaching out they refunded me all the money I lost though. I’m studying my choices
I think most would expect to just have a remote Git repo where you can push your site to. That would then do a checkout on the web server automatically.
Precisely this! 1MB is perfect for a small "hosting" company putting other small companies online, e.g. John's bakery. A git deploy functionality would drastically improve automation to manage websites. I know the provided cli can do it, but it's a other thing to integrate.
In the GitHub integration, it could watch for changes in a repository (there's a webhook for that) and then 1mbsite would fetch the files and deploy them.
Git integration is like Heroku. The user types `git push 1mbsite master` and 1mbsite would publish it.
I haven't personally used it, so I don't know its limits, but Netlify offers an OSS CMS tool that you have to setup and configure yourself on your own static site.
If you don’t understand Git you can use 1MB. When you log in you get access to a code editor in your browser. It has lots of features to help get you online fast. 1MB is meant to be an easy to use tool, but it does offer advanced deployment options too via API and CLI. Also it has a NoSQL database unlike GitHub and GitLab Pages.
Hello my name is Dalton Edwards and I’ve been building this project for over half a year. I’m sorry I didn’t make that clearer (I do link to my personal site in the footer). I’ll write a bio about myself on the homepage.
Alright I found the link. OVH’s 10MB plan only has 1 GB of monthly bandwidth while 1MB’s is unmetered (fair use - don’t abuse). OVH’s 10MB plan doesn’t give you access to a database while 1MB gives you access to a secure NoSQL database. In closing they have more storage but they make up for that by taking away some core functionality that 1MB offers. https://www.ovh.co.uk/domains/start10m_hosting_offer.xml
I don't know why everyone is being so negative in the comments so far. It's really discouraging to other people who want to share something they made. It makes me sad.
OP: This is cool. It's not meant to replace Netlify or GH Pages or a million other things, and I understand that. Some people just want to make something and you made something. You've done more than so many people here by just releasing something and that's something to take great pride in. I don't have a use for it personally, but I think it's really cool and I took a look at the code to see what was going on. I found it neat.
Ignore and excuse everyone that's expecting a multi-million dollar product from you.
Everyone else: If you're genuinely asking "what's the point of this?" or "why's it free? who are you? why should I trust you?" or "what does this do that Netlify or GH Pages doesn't" — let's get real for a minute: Not everything is meant to compete with these services, or any service. There are a hundred-thousand products that exist on the internet with very happy users that you and I have never heard of. This bias that everything needs to be "the one" that we all use is discouraging, isn't the goal of this community, and isn't in the hacker spirit. It's fine to be skeptical and curious, but don't be a downer or shame.
This is show and tell: Timmy brought a rock he thinks is cool, Cassie brought her mom's diamonds, and Shaun brought a 2Pac album. Don't yuck other people's yums.
I feel like there’s a lot of tools out there to simplify web development but none that do it how I wanted them to. I don’t want a drag-and-drop builder and I don’t want a command line only interface (although we offer one - the key is choices). I want to be able to easily code right inside my browser.
The reason why the web is centralized is that people use other people's computers to host instead of their own. Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now. Hosting a simple static site is easy and works well.
If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.
> Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now.
Uh... Down maybe. Up... We're not quite there yet. Rural America (sometimes just a few miles outside a major city) can have <5meg down and under 0.5meg up. During non-peak hours that is.
If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.
This reads as condemning someone because of the actions of others. Like if I said to you: If I hire you, you'll just steal my source code like Levandowski did when he was at Google.
I don't think anyone would appreciate the second statement.. but you seem eager to condemn the motivations of this project without learning a single thing about the founder and his ethics or motivations.
I don't need to know anything about the founder or his ethics. Once popularity brings in money only having one set of rules will always create a highly censored environment. Self-hosting bypasses this by allowing many sets of rules.
Everyone saying that 100KB/s upload isn't enough to host a static site that is under <1MB in size is either ignorant or intentionally disingenuous. I was hosting my static site from home on far less than that for a decade.
> Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now. Hosting a simple static site is easy and works well.
Hardly. 2 megabytes/s download, around 120 kilobytes/s upload - my upload speed barely even reaches one megabit.
And it's from a dynamic IP, and connectivity drops off randomly once a month.
Could I host a static site on my own computer, with a little fiddling? Sure. Even a dynamic one. And it would be slow as molasses, and it would probably get denial'o'service-d if getting ten visitors at the same time.
I did it on dynamic IP connections with far less upstream for more than a decade. Luckily I've had 5-10 megabit up for another decade on top of that and it's even easier now. But it's certainly possible and even easy on limited connections. We're not talking 56k here. Also, limiting bandwidth to some appropriate value is also not hard.
And so what if your websites goes offline for a few hours a handful of times a year? Or even a week. It doesn't matter. This isn't some profit driven job.
This is called switching cost and it's a challenge for any new business in an established market.
Consumers ask themselves this question constantly and it's something you need to be prepared to answer if you want people to use your service instead of X.
I'm currently using Netlify for free static hosting. How is 1MB any better than Netlify?
I wouldn't mind if you pasted this at the top of every Show HN. On the other hand, sometimes it's useful to point out similar things that exist. Maybe the author actually didn't know about those things and would like to! Criticism always requires walking a fine line being constructive or being discouraging. It's even harder with strangers whose intentions and motivations you don't know!
I don’t mind when people bring up these arguments I’m here for a healthy discussion and to let everybody know that 1MB will help you get your site online fast.
I agree with your points, but can you link to the specific comments on this HN post that you think were made as disingenuous criticisms? I read through all the comments just now, and none of them seem to have any degree of antagonism or unfairness at all, not even the ones that (quite respectfully & dispassionately) ask to know how it is different than possible alternatives (and the 1mb creator does a nice job replying to them too).
The comments here all look quite reasonable & polite. Maybe I am missing something? I can’t see any comment that warrants you to have posted this here (though, again, I agree with all your points).
I hear ya. The tone / atmosphere on HN can be underwhelming at times.
One of the main reasons I show up here is to see what others are charing. That said, those doing Show HN should probably scan some other Show HN's to get a sense of what people are looking for.
- What is it? High level.
- Why should I care? That is, what's in it for me.
- Along the same lines, benefits (not features)
- What is it? Deeper, the technology behind it.
- What makes it different (and perhaps better)?
- If it free, assure me (or not) I'm not the product.
- Along the same lines, be upfront about what you might do - or not - with any data using the product might provide.
- Why? Why did you do this? There's a difference between launching some cookie cutter product and a side project for learning / exploring.
When I get around to it, I'm going to do a proper blog post on this list.
The problem is he's not marketing his product here on HN for his benefit. He's not writing up a post about his ideas and process of creating his product, just spamming the forum for exposure. The mods really have to crack down on this type of viral self serving marketing, or it'd just encourage more people to do the same. On top of that, it's a shittier product that other people have done and done better at the same cost. Maybe post it somewhere where people are actually looking for this product.
Thanks for sharing your unfounded opinion. Also in regards to posting my product somewhere where people are looking for it.. Hacker News was obviously the right choice with all these upvotes and site traffic ;)
I’m curious, when a young person, a friend, or an inexperienced developer at your company asks for your opinion about something they’ve made, do you respond with: it’s a shittier product that other people have done better?
He could have put "Show HN" in the title. But you seem unaware that this is one of the functions of this website. In fact, there's an entire section for it with a link in the header: https://news.ycombinator.com/show
Show HN is suppose to be helpful criticism and feedback. Calling it a "shittier product" is entirely uncalled for. Not just for the language, but because it's entirely unconstructive. It helps no one.
"The bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
At this point I'm wary of hauling the old Dropbox example, having learned that the author has acknowledged his mistake in being prematurely dismissive. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988051)
Regarding 1MB: looks like a good idea for teaching people how to get a simple website on the web. Like many here, I grew up in the age of Geocities and similar services.
I'm happy to have high quality services like Netlify available for me, but we need more indie services to serve as entry points for newcomers. Netlify and co. may change; we're already centralizing development workflows too much (e.g. GitHub).
More power to small creators using their resources to open up spaces for other creators.
The existence of another sandwich shop, even a successful and tasty one, doesn't mean I can't open up one of my own - or that my sandwiches need be exposed to constant criticism for lacking some arbitrary ingredient such as, say, tarragon or sage. Not all websites need to offer the digital equivalent of say beansprouts with hollandaise spread even if you really like that (it sounds magnificent tbh).
Nor do they need a new spin on sandwiches or a new innovation in sandwichcraft. All they need is to execute well: offer fair prices, quality service, and use decent ingredients. That's quite enough. It's not the French Laundry, ok fine, who cares?
We are at a point of tech where people are opening up internet sandwich shops. That's fine. A well executed me-too nothing-new thing is totally absolutely fine. The internet is big enough for all of us. Have a good time and enjoy building stuff.
Super nice. Despite presence of weebly, gumroad, shopify, squarespace, carrd et al, there is something missing that would put the rest of world on web, I feel; much like how WhatsApp has replaced most modes of personal communication in one fell swoop over the years, and how Twitter has taken over micro-blogging (key point: Both are free).
To do that, I guess, 1mb or similar businesses could add capability to create a website, post to it, update it via something as ubiquitous as WhatsApp, kind of like a Tumblr or posterous clone; add ability to accept payments, sell things.
Curiously, among my friends, telegram is used to consume content. They subscribe to telegram-channels and simply search for content posted and browse it right from the app. Much like how YouTube has replaced games, and Instagram has replaced Facebook, telegram in a sense has replaced Google/Browser.
Perhaps, someone needs to invent a new kind of web that is in symbiosis with WhatsApp or these other very popular apps. I guess that is exactly what Meesho [0] is doing, but not quite? May be some business like 1mb will figure it all out.
I would have given my left ear to have a similar service growing up. There were a billion "free hosting" sites that let you throw PHP scripts up on them, and "free mysql" hosts that let you have a couple of free tables of X rows, which give a 12yo an incredible head start when it came to web-dev. The downside is that those sites were trying to push scuzzy gambling sites or were soft targets for hackers. This feels like a clean, modern reincarnation of that!
No, this isn't posterous where your creations will live forever, this is a little playground for those who don't know how to or rather not configure a VPS for a little toy they've made.
Thank you for your kind words! In closing I can assure you that your creations will live forever on 1MB as long as you don’t delete your account and follow everything outlined on https://policy.1mb.site. Also pride ourselves in being more secure than your average free website host
Have you had a proper security review? I don't think you would have made that mistake with user-websites being able to log out the user if you had designed with security as an important objective.
Like, it's OK that you didn't, but maybe you should check that your entire public API (all microservices, UI, etc) will really be secure.
You will probably struggle to get a secure interface while user content is served from the same domain as your UI.
I think the interaction in this forum thread says a lot about my focus on security. An issue was reported and I jumped on it immediately. I’m not going to sit here and claim to be perfect, but I am going to tell you that I work really hard to make sure I do stuff right and fix my mistakes ASAP. I have had white hat hackers review my API by the way and have patched reported security vulnerabilities.
Kudos for quickly adding an anti-csrf token to logout, but I agree with the grandparent that hosting arbitrary user content on the same TLD as the management interface is still problematic security-wise.
See github.com vs github.io[1], amazon.com vs. elasticbeanstalk.com, azure.com vs azurewebsites.net, etc... Every major company I know of that hosts arbitrary user content dedicates a TLD to it that's not shared by the management APIs.
Sites like Tumblr do it and are fine, and they allow custom HTML and JS also. Cookies are HTTP only and inaccessible with JavaScript. And framing is blocked.
>I don't think you would have made that mistake with user-websites being able to log out the user if you had designed with security as an important objective.
Really? In my experience not many people care about logout CSRF, it's the lowest of low risk vulns that infosec consultants write in a report when they don't have any real vulnerabilities. I'm not sure its presence really says much about the site overall.
Effort is much better spent elsewhere - strict Content-Security-Policy, for example. Or, if there are 'real' CSRF vulns that actually do damage
This reminds me of "lifetime" warranties on products where "lifetime" is defined as some arbitrary lifetime of the product, rather than the lifetime of the buyer.
That's...pretty much the guarantee for any product that claims "lifetime". The Tilley clothing company (best known for their hats) warrants many of their items "forever" as in (and I quote) "leave it in your will". That all goes out the window if Tilley goes out of business, however.
I don't know, that analogy doesn't quite seem right. This company is providing a service, not producing a product - it's more like if the Tilley clothing company said something like "we will continue manufacturing hats forever".
> In closing I can assure you that your creations will live forever on 1MB
I can assure you that the opposite is true. Tumblr deleted half their content. MySpace lost all their content. GeoCities lost everything. Facebook "accidentally" lost Zuckerberg's old posts and with all the money and software "engineers" in the world can't recover them. Startups and corporations that had the kind of money and technical expertise you could only dream of can't keep data forever. Don't get carried away and make promises there is no way you can keep.
EDIT: I see you've redefined forever in the fine print:
> 1MB is not a big company. This is a project funded, developed, and maintained by an individual. By subscribing to Pro you are helping keep this project online for years to come.
> (1) Forever or for the life of the project. 1MB isn't going anywhere, but we also can't predict the future. No refunds!
While I'm not trying to invalidate your point, it seems that given the size of 1MB sites you could have a backup of a few milions of websites for under $1[0]. Also, while the maximum size is 1mb not all sites would use all available quota so the actual average size will probably be lower than 1 megabyte driving the cost down even further. This means that that even without VS's or other investors a single person would be able to cover the costs of keeping those sites. Well, assuming there is a will to do so.
[0] For example,archive storage at OVH runs at 0.0026$ per GB, so having a backup of 4 million 1mb sites would cost 1.04$/month for three copies of data.
> software "engineers"
The quotes aren't necessary. They definitely have a few good software engineers, and this issue definitely isn't a technical one.
I also notice the inflation of laissez-faire self titling but it usually doesn't bother me. Just the other day I met a flying machine service worker who proudly introduced himself as a copilot. Our train handling ancestry are locomoting over in their repositories about this!
Edit: it looks like these carcas pits are all calling themselves graves now ;-)
I ran one of the larger free hosts and managed and hosted around 100 others; security is a big issue. If you get mildly popular the number of attacks will jump up. Hope you know more than I did and that the tech evolved enough; the hosts I built and managed were 10+ years ago and I had to create my own freehost specific patches to php, apache and mysql to protect from abuse. You do not do dynamic so that makes a large difference, still they will try!
Edit; we also made custom scanners for porn and phishing; especially phishing, at that time had a simply pattern; the phishing page(s) would have keywords in them and would not be linked anywhere on the domain while not being the index.html. That allowed us to move almost all of them automatically.
To be fair though, I don't think that's a huge problem. Plenty of excellent static site generators exist (I use Jekyll) and truth be told if you want any real level of functionality this probably isn't the service for you anyway.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that visited that website. I was there religiously. If you ever want to get all nostalgic and stuff my email is in my profile!
free.fr has been offering this, ad-free, since the 90s. It is Xavier Niel company, Free is a French ISP and he alos funded "42" : a private, nonprofit and tuition-free computer programming school IT school.
The service itself is really cool and lines up nicely with the likes of Netlify and Github pages. I have two concerns though:
1) This doesn't seem to be connected to any major company, so how are you going to handle abuse of the service? With 'free hosting' offerings like this often comes a wave of abuse and malicious actors, so dealing with them is going to take significant resources.
2) How are you planning to monetize the service? Even though most sites hosted wont exceed a few kb, hosting fees will quickly add up, and unless you are using a cheap bare metal server you will likely face significant monthly bills.
These concerns aside, the service looks really awesome for most personal blog use cases, so congratulations to a successful launch!
1. For the past half year I’ve been moderating the site myself and also have automated filters I’ve coded. I’m recruiting some volunteer moderators soon!
2. 1MB was monetized in the past but got banned by our payment processor because they consider web hosting to be a risky business. It’s honestly my own fault I should’ve read the terms. 1MB will be monetized again soon when I implement a new payment processor: https://pro.1mb.site
Just dig into each that might fit your situation looking for people's props and gripes about them. Edited to add the HN link since commenters mentioned other services.
Wow, this is fantastic -- can't count the number of "free hosting" sites that are disappointing because they don't have a database. Well done! I may try it out.
1. To store the site content in
2. To store metadata that gets integrated into the generated site
3. To record stats/metadata about the site generation
There's probably other scenarios people can think of.
I refer to it as static hosting because even when using a 1MB database you’re querying it with JavaScript. Also databases are a new addition to 1MB so I’m at this weird crossroads where I don’t know if it’s static hosting anymore. Thank you!
Why is it called 1MB? Is it a reference to the maximum storage you get? It'd be interesting for size optimized sites.
Also are the sites supposed to look that big? https://i.imgur.com/QIRNATC.jpg (sorry for shitty photo quality, my phone is ancient... i took a photo instead of a screenshot to show how big it looks physically)
It’s called 1MB because free members get 1 megabyte of storage. You build your site from scratch or use a template. That’s just how I chose to make my site look
So i tried it out: https://badsector.1mb.site/ (this is something i made a few years ago, i didn't make it now :-P)
The UI looks a bit too big on my monitor, but other than that it is nice for small stuff. I think it needs some way to upload multiple files from the browser via upload dialog and/or dragdrop (like imgur does, for example).
Also i found the editor autocompleting the closing tag very annoying! Also a bit annoying was the "smart" autoindentation (autoindent is fine of course, but trying to be smart clashes with how i'd indent things).
This looks really neat! Seems perfect for those set-and-forget, single purpose type websites. Maybe I'll move https://xkcd.wtf over to you!
The only question is: how long will you be able to run this? There have been so many free webhosts that shut down over night, my confidence in any hosting project is limited
I’ve been running 1MB for over half a year and it’s my passion project. I’m constantly improving and adding new features to it. 1MB makes money from Pro upgrades it’s just temporarily unavailable. I want to run this project for years to come. https://pro.1mb.site
What are the magic words? Are they "Abracadabra", "Alakazam" or "Open Sesame" perhaps?
No.
The magic words are: "Passion Project".
In any marketplace, there are 800lb Gorillas, medium players, and "Passion Projects".
I tend to root for the "Passion Project", having several of my own.
I mean, this is America, right, many of us root for the underdog, right?
Good luck with your "Passion Project"! May it grow and grow! (Also, realize that as it does, it will attract more and more criticism -> criticism = barometer of fame and indicator of success, that's criticism's secret identity, just so you know in advance! <g>)
“Securely access a NoSQL database using nothing but JavaScript
With permissions, enforced fields, and the ability to get the logged in 1MB username you can easily create a dynamic application. Check out chat.1mb.site and forum.1mb.site which are both applications that utilize a 1MB database.
Click here to read the API documentation.” looks like inspect element lol
I'd change the headline to "1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database".
That database is the edge you have compared to Netlify and Github pages people are asking for :)
The authentication part is a nice touch, too. Feels more like a community thing.
Checked out the API and you even have easy to setup database permissions. I like it.
-
Questions: do you plan to offer paid plans for people wishing to host more than 1MB, or having paid support? Maybe paid private login workspaces and SSO could be a paid feature too.
You should really consider having Pro not being a onetime fee, but rather a monthly subscription, or at the very least both options. A single one time $100 fee is unlikely to go well with most users, but many more would be ok with contributing $5 or so a month if it meant supporting a good service.
Pro is $5 a month or $100 for a lifetime plan. The monthly option isn’t available until I implement the new payment processor but please stay tuned I hear you :)
Hey I know monthly is more popular with investors but thanks for offering a one time fee, I consider that quite innovative for the web-hosting market :)
Worth telling people that a $5 a month is coming soon. Collect their email addresses.
Also the "no one can predict the future" is a bit scary so another thing is to promise you can get your data out as a static site for netlify, github etc. at any time.
Thanks. But: I am suggesting you add clarity for other visitors to your site so you don't lose them because they think $100 and "it might disappear next year + tough shit no refund" is the only option.
By the way your offering fills a certain niche that I am interested in. That is the niche where a technical person like myself wants to design a site using HTML & CSS in text editor (how else would you do it!) but there is another nontechnical person who wants a nicer editor to edit the content. In addition I want a fast and cheap CDN type of offering. Netlify is what I use now, but it means I have to make the wording changes which sucks.
I imagine this is a common situation for small time website developers. For example if I make a site for the local pizza delivery, they might need to change their menu, but it is good if they can do it directly. But I like to host it as a static site so I know it is less likely to get hacked or be slow, and I can back it up more easily (looking at you Wordpress+MySQL+Bunch of PHP files called plugins).
I've taken the liberty of adding that database bit to the title above. (The submitter can let us know if they don't want it there and we'll take it out if so.)
I haven't tried this yet but it reminds me of the spirit of GeoCities.
For years now I've been hoping that one day the wheel of internet trends will roll back around and make personally-designed webpages a thing again instead of this bland "social media" landscape.
Is the 1MB name a reference to data limit? I couldn't see anything saying so but that's what sprang to mind.
I like it. Some people have expressed concerns about yet another platform which holds your data. I don't actually have a problem with that as long as you can leave without being penalized. A good way to alleviate those concerns might be a feature where you could download all of your site data along with a guide to setting it up self hosted.
You get 1MB of storage. Don’t be discouraged though most users don’t even come close to using it all. You can delete all your data from my server at any time.
This looks really cool! It seems like it's just what I've been looking for lately, without realizing it. Will look more into this when I get back from vacation. Thanks for sharing and showing.
250 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] thread1. Why a custom JS-based CLI tool for deployment? What does it do? Why not something like plain SSH?
2. What is the plan for this? Presumably you'll want to monetize the project? Will you ever add ads to my sites? Or will you offer premium features?
3. What's the reason for the NoSQL DB?
4. Your CLI tool only allows .png files as images. Is there a reason you don't allow any other types?
5. Is there a limit on the number of sites you can have or the storage you can use?
Were u allowed to withdraw your balance? What r u switching too?
You can totally have a secure sftp endpoint on your filehost.
Have browser, will content.
Git integration is like Heroku. The user types `git push 1mbsite master` and 1mbsite would publish it.
https://www.netlifycms.org/
Especially when a service is free, I want to know a little about who I’m getting involved with.
Edit: what’s the deal with the downvotes? It’s entirely reasonable to ask who is behind a service.
Is making the front page of HN and doing 50gb in one day "abuse"?
But if you're hitting the frontpage twice a month, probably time to pay for a plan.
OP: This is cool. It's not meant to replace Netlify or GH Pages or a million other things, and I understand that. Some people just want to make something and you made something. You've done more than so many people here by just releasing something and that's something to take great pride in. I don't have a use for it personally, but I think it's really cool and I took a look at the code to see what was going on. I found it neat.
Ignore and excuse everyone that's expecting a multi-million dollar product from you.
Everyone else: If you're genuinely asking "what's the point of this?" or "why's it free? who are you? why should I trust you?" or "what does this do that Netlify or GH Pages doesn't" — let's get real for a minute: Not everything is meant to compete with these services, or any service. There are a hundred-thousand products that exist on the internet with very happy users that you and I have never heard of. This bias that everything needs to be "the one" that we all use is discouraging, isn't the goal of this community, and isn't in the hacker spirit. It's fine to be skeptical and curious, but don't be a downer or shame.
This is show and tell: Timmy brought a rock he thinks is cool, Cassie brought her mom's diamonds, and Shaun brought a 2Pac album. Don't yuck other people's yums.
While I have you: What itch lead you to build this? What did you draw inspiration from?
That’s as good a reason as any. Similar reasons to that are why there have been some large changes in the way people use computers at all.
Nice work and good luck
If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.
Uh... Down maybe. Up... We're not quite there yet. Rural America (sometimes just a few miles outside a major city) can have <5meg down and under 0.5meg up. During non-peak hours that is.
This reads as condemning someone because of the actions of others. Like if I said to you: If I hire you, you'll just steal my source code like Levandowski did when he was at Google.
I don't think anyone would appreciate the second statement.. but you seem eager to condemn the motivations of this project without learning a single thing about the founder and his ethics or motivations.
Everyone saying that 100KB/s upload isn't enough to host a static site that is under <1MB in size is either ignorant or intentionally disingenuous. I was hosting my static site from home on far less than that for a decade.
Hardly. 2 megabytes/s download, around 120 kilobytes/s upload - my upload speed barely even reaches one megabit.
And it's from a dynamic IP, and connectivity drops off randomly once a month.
Could I host a static site on my own computer, with a little fiddling? Sure. Even a dynamic one. And it would be slow as molasses, and it would probably get denial'o'service-d if getting ten visitors at the same time.
And so what if your websites goes offline for a few hours a handful of times a year? Or even a week. It doesn't matter. This isn't some profit driven job.
This is called switching cost and it's a challenge for any new business in an established market.
Consumers ask themselves this question constantly and it's something you need to be prepared to answer if you want people to use your service instead of X.
I'm currently using Netlify for free static hosting. How is 1MB any better than Netlify?
The comments here all look quite reasonable & polite. Maybe I am missing something? I can’t see any comment that warrants you to have posted this here (though, again, I agree with all your points).
One of the main reasons I show up here is to see what others are charing. That said, those doing Show HN should probably scan some other Show HN's to get a sense of what people are looking for.
- What is it? High level. - Why should I care? That is, what's in it for me. - Along the same lines, benefits (not features) - What is it? Deeper, the technology behind it. - What makes it different (and perhaps better)? - If it free, assure me (or not) I'm not the product. - Along the same lines, be upfront about what you might do - or not - with any data using the product might provide. - Why? Why did you do this? There's a difference between launching some cookie cutter product and a side project for learning / exploring.
When I get around to it, I'm going to do a proper blog post on this list.
Show HN is suppose to be helpful criticism and feedback. Calling it a "shittier product" is entirely uncalled for. Not just for the language, but because it's entirely unconstructive. It helps no one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
"The bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
- Anton Ego (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ratatouille)
Regarding 1MB: looks like a good idea for teaching people how to get a simple website on the web. Like many here, I grew up in the age of Geocities and similar services.
I'm happy to have high quality services like Netlify available for me, but we need more indie services to serve as entry points for newcomers. Netlify and co. may change; we're already centralizing development workflows too much (e.g. GitHub).
More power to small creators using their resources to open up spaces for other creators.
The existence of another sandwich shop, even a successful and tasty one, doesn't mean I can't open up one of my own - or that my sandwiches need be exposed to constant criticism for lacking some arbitrary ingredient such as, say, tarragon or sage. Not all websites need to offer the digital equivalent of say beansprouts with hollandaise spread even if you really like that (it sounds magnificent tbh).
Nor do they need a new spin on sandwiches or a new innovation in sandwichcraft. All they need is to execute well: offer fair prices, quality service, and use decent ingredients. That's quite enough. It's not the French Laundry, ok fine, who cares?
We are at a point of tech where people are opening up internet sandwich shops. That's fine. A well executed me-too nothing-new thing is totally absolutely fine. The internet is big enough for all of us. Have a good time and enjoy building stuff.
To do that, I guess, 1mb or similar businesses could add capability to create a website, post to it, update it via something as ubiquitous as WhatsApp, kind of like a Tumblr or posterous clone; add ability to accept payments, sell things.
Curiously, among my friends, telegram is used to consume content. They subscribe to telegram-channels and simply search for content posted and browse it right from the app. Much like how YouTube has replaced games, and Instagram has replaced Facebook, telegram in a sense has replaced Google/Browser.
Perhaps, someone needs to invent a new kind of web that is in symbiosis with WhatsApp or these other very popular apps. I guess that is exactly what Meesho [0] is doing, but not quite? May be some business like 1mb will figure it all out.
[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/meesho/
[0]: https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...
I would have given my left ear to have a similar service growing up. There were a billion "free hosting" sites that let you throw PHP scripts up on them, and "free mysql" hosts that let you have a couple of free tables of X rows, which give a 12yo an incredible head start when it came to web-dev. The downside is that those sites were trying to push scuzzy gambling sites or were soft targets for hackers. This feels like a clean, modern reincarnation of that!
No, this isn't posterous where your creations will live forever, this is a little playground for those who don't know how to or rather not configure a VPS for a little toy they've made.
Great job!
(EDIT: Shout-out to 2008's T35.com and CJB.net and their free php hosting and short sub-domains https://web.archive.org/web/20080617010556/http://www.t35.co... , https://web.archive.org/web/20080408210303/http://www.cjb.ne...)
Like, it's OK that you didn't, but maybe you should check that your entire public API (all microservices, UI, etc) will really be secure.
You will probably struggle to get a secure interface while user content is served from the same domain as your UI.
I think the interaction in this forum thread says a lot about my focus on security. An issue was reported and I jumped on it immediately. I’m not going to sit here and claim to be perfect, but I am going to tell you that I work really hard to make sure I do stuff right and fix my mistakes ASAP. I have had white hat hackers review my API by the way and have patched reported security vulnerabilities.
See github.com vs github.io[1], amazon.com vs. elasticbeanstalk.com, azure.com vs azurewebsites.net, etc... Every major company I know of that hosts arbitrary user content dedicates a TLD to it that's not shared by the management APIs.
[1] https://github.blog/2013-04-05-new-github-pages-domain-githu...
Really? In my experience not many people care about logout CSRF, it's the lowest of low risk vulns that infosec consultants write in a report when they don't have any real vulnerabilities. I'm not sure its presence really says much about the site overall.
Effort is much better spent elsewhere - strict Content-Security-Policy, for example. Or, if there are 'real' CSRF vulns that actually do damage
I can assure you that the opposite is true. Tumblr deleted half their content. MySpace lost all their content. GeoCities lost everything. Facebook "accidentally" lost Zuckerberg's old posts and with all the money and software "engineers" in the world can't recover them. Startups and corporations that had the kind of money and technical expertise you could only dream of can't keep data forever. Don't get carried away and make promises there is no way you can keep.
EDIT: I see you've redefined forever in the fine print:
> 1MB is not a big company. This is a project funded, developed, and maintained by an individual. By subscribing to Pro you are helping keep this project online for years to come.
> (1) Forever or for the life of the project. 1MB isn't going anywhere, but we also can't predict the future. No refunds!
Small nitpick, but Yahoo deleted everything. Let's not forget how poorly run Yahoo is.
[0] For example,archive storage at OVH runs at 0.0026$ per GB, so having a backup of 4 million 1mb sites would cost 1.04$/month for three copies of data.
Edit: it looks like these carcas pits are all calling themselves graves now ;-)
Edit; we also made custom scanners for porn and phishing; especially phishing, at that time had a simply pattern; the phishing page(s) would have keywords in them and would not be linked anywhere on the domain while not being the index.html. That allowed us to move almost all of them automatically.
I wasted so much time on that gosh darn site...
1) This doesn't seem to be connected to any major company, so how are you going to handle abuse of the service? With 'free hosting' offerings like this often comes a wave of abuse and malicious actors, so dealing with them is going to take significant resources.
2) How are you planning to monetize the service? Even though most sites hosted wont exceed a few kb, hosting fees will quickly add up, and unless you are using a cheap bare metal server you will likely face significant monthly bills.
These concerns aside, the service looks really awesome for most personal blog use cases, so congratulations to a successful launch!
https://startupstash.com/paypal-alternatives/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771573
Just dig into each that might fit your situation looking for people's props and gripes about them. Edited to add the HN link since commenters mentioned other services.
There's probably other scenarios people can think of.
Looks good.
Also are the sites supposed to look that big? https://i.imgur.com/QIRNATC.jpg (sorry for shitty photo quality, my phone is ancient... i took a photo instead of a screenshot to show how big it looks physically)
The UI looks a bit too big on my monitor, but other than that it is nice for small stuff. I think it needs some way to upload multiple files from the browser via upload dialog and/or dragdrop (like imgur does, for example).
Also i found the editor autocompleting the closing tag very annoying! Also a bit annoying was the "smart" autoindentation (autoindent is fine of course, but trying to be smart clashes with how i'd indent things).
Anyway, good luck with it :-).
Definitely bookmarking this so that I can come back to it and see what I can build once I have time.
The only question is: how long will you be able to run this? There have been so many free webhosts that shut down over night, my confidence in any hosting project is limited
I do wish for you to succeed, so I'll keep my fingers crossed! ;-)
Also, you said the magic words...
What are the magic words? Are they "Abracadabra", "Alakazam" or "Open Sesame" perhaps?
No.
The magic words are: "Passion Project".
In any marketplace, there are 800lb Gorillas, medium players, and "Passion Projects".
I tend to root for the "Passion Project", having several of my own.
I mean, this is America, right, many of us root for the underdog, right?
Good luck with your "Passion Project"! May it grow and grow! (Also, realize that as it does, it will attract more and more criticism -> criticism = barometer of fame and indicator of success, that's criticism's secret identity, just so you know in advance! <g>)
https://i.imgur.com/WNBbIep.png
With permissions, enforced fields, and the ability to get the logged in 1MB username you can easily create a dynamic application. Check out chat.1mb.site and forum.1mb.site which are both applications that utilize a 1MB database.
Click here to read the API documentation.” looks like inspect element lol
I'd change the headline to "1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database".
That database is the edge you have compared to Netlify and Github pages people are asking for :)
The authentication part is a nice touch, too. Feels more like a community thing.
Checked out the API and you even have easy to setup database permissions. I like it.
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Questions: do you plan to offer paid plans for people wishing to host more than 1MB, or having paid support? Maybe paid private login workspaces and SSO could be a paid feature too.
Also the "no one can predict the future" is a bit scary so another thing is to promise you can get your data out as a static site for netlify, github etc. at any time.
By the way your offering fills a certain niche that I am interested in. That is the niche where a technical person like myself wants to design a site using HTML & CSS in text editor (how else would you do it!) but there is another nontechnical person who wants a nicer editor to edit the content. In addition I want a fast and cheap CDN type of offering. Netlify is what I use now, but it means I have to make the wording changes which sucks.
I imagine this is a common situation for small time website developers. For example if I make a site for the local pizza delivery, they might need to change their menu, but it is good if they can do it directly. But I like to host it as a static site so I know it is less likely to get hacked or be slow, and I can back it up more easily (looking at you Wordpress+MySQL+Bunch of PHP files called plugins).
For years now I've been hoping that one day the wheel of internet trends will roll back around and make personally-designed webpages a thing again instead of this bland "social media" landscape.
I like it. Some people have expressed concerns about yet another platform which holds your data. I don't actually have a problem with that as long as you can leave without being penalized. A good way to alleviate those concerns might be a feature where you could download all of your site data along with a guide to setting it up self hosted.