97 replies

1. John Allsopp Bluesky 4 min later

   A while back I accidentally wiped two ancient sites. Had no original source. Grabbed it from archive.org and got them back up and running. Then promptly forgot where I was hosting them!

   1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 11 min later

      I love archive.org so much

      1. John Allsopp Bluesky 9 hr later

         the library of Alexandria for our time.

2. catraxx Mastodon 5 min later

   @zachleat Once i wrangle the domain into compliance about 5 minutes.

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 10 min later

      @catraxx GOALS

      1. catraxx Mastodon 11 min later

         @zachleat Well i forbade myself to use JS on my website so there isn't much to it xD

         1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 12 min later

            @catraxx STRETCH GOALS

         2. 8BWqcwh Mastodon 21 min later

            @catraxx @zachleat dark mode?

            1. catraxx Mastodon 22 min later

               @8BWqcwh @zachleat Do not currently have one, but done per system preference and css switch.

3. ari Mastodon 14 min later

   @zachleat however long DNS takes to propagate

4. Deni Mintsaev 🇪🇺 Mastodon 18 min later

   @zachleat I just use a bare Linux VPS for most of my websites, but I do have it hardened a fair bit, so I'd have to harden my new VPS when switching over too. I have a deployment bash script with my hardening stuff in there, and none of my code is tied into my current hosting provider, so it shouldn't be hard.

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 22 min later

      @mintydev if it’s too hard you did too much hardening

      1. Deni Mintsaev 🇪🇺 Mastodon 57 min later

         @zachleat it's not too hard. I mean, I could just move it over and not care about hardening. The "have to" part is not a requirement for my websites to function, it's just for my peace of mind.

         1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 1 hr later

            @mintydev ah sorry I was just making a word joke

            *runs away*

5. Juhis Mastodon 21 min later

   @zachleat Very portable: it's a folder full of files!

   I do regular checkups to make sure my depedencies to build and deploy are limited, intentional and as far on the outskirts (ie. additional/optional rather than core functions) as possible.

   https://hamatti.org/posts/website-self-sustenance-checkup/

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 23 min later

      @hamatti I love this! Regular checkups!

6. Andrew Douglass Mastodon 31 min later

   @zachleat I will be distributing the next version of my website exclusively on flash drives for maximum portability.

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 35 min later

      @ardouglass just scatter them on the ground, good distribution model

      1. Andrew Douglass Mastodon 1 hr later

         @zachleat think of it less like littering e-waste and more like marketing my personal brand.

7. Jim Nielsen Mastodon 33 min later

   @zachleat there’s gotta be a correlation between:

   - how fast you can switch hosting providers, and
   - how performant your site is for end users

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 35 min later

      @jimniels hah! I want to believe (but I have doubts 😅)

8. Mattias Karlsson (he/him) Mastodon 34 min later

   @zachleat mine's just a couple of static HTML files, so it could probably be served even from my dishwasher if I wanted to 🤣

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 35 min later

      @devlead gotta sanitize that HTML

9. Paul Robert Lloyd 🐢 Mastodon 46 min later

   @zachleat Once worked on a website for a cryptocurrency (low point of my career, took 9 months off after to recover) and this was very much a consideration, for reasons you can well imagine. 🤨

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 47 min later

      @paulrobertlloyd regulatory worries? or security concerns?

      1. Paul Robert Lloyd 🐢 Mastodon 1 day later

         @zachleat Regulatory, mainly. Concern was that they might need to change the country their website was hosted in at short notice 😅

10. Michael Bluesky 56 min later

    If it's WordPress, @roots.io tools can help you keep it in version control, and this set of actions and workflows can help you make "releases" of the site (complete with database and uploads backup).

    These tools took moving WordPress sites from a week-long cross-your-fingers process to around 20min

    1. Michael Bluesky 56 min later

       github.com/MWDelaney/tr...

       1. Michael Bluesky 1 hr later

          Oh hey, I totally forgot about this one. This should still work to ease the transition from a traditional WordPress site to a @roots.io Bedrock structure.

          github.com/MWDelaney/li...

          1. Chance Bluesky 5 hr later

             Haven’t built on WP in years but the Roots folks always made it a joy

          2. Private reply Bluesky 5 hr later
11. Nathan Knowler Mastodon 1 hr later

    @zachleat Spinoff question: if your backend is JS-based, how fast can you switch JS runtimes?

    1. Nathan Knowler Mastodon 1 hr later

       @zachleat Ironically, those running Node probably don’t have to do a thing because everyone targets Node for compat — I’ve accidentally run `deno run entrypoint.js` for a Node project and it’s just worked.

    2. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 1 hr later

       @knowler that this question even has risk is a HUGE INDICTMENT on the JS ecosystem

12. Ben Mastodon 1 hr later

    @zachleat I currently rely on Netlify Forms, so I’d have to find an alternative for a contact form on one site. It only gets like… one hit per month, maybe, so if things were really desperate I’d make a new email account and put up a mailto link until I found an alternative provider.

    The harder thing to change than hosting provider would be if I needed to replace GitHub, due to the integrations and widespread support.

    That said, I’m primarily building static sites. Backends add complexity.

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 1 hr later

       @sangster seems like a pretty good footprint!

       1. Ben Mastodon 14 hr later

          @zachleat Eleventy sure does make it easy!

    2. Sara Joy Mastodon 3 hr later

       @sangster this an option for you? https://letterbird.co/

       @zachleat

       1. Ben Mastodon 5 days later

          @sarajw @zachleat I don’t need it now, but it might be a good replacement if I do!

13. Private reply Mastodon 1 hr later
    1. Private reply Mastodon 1 hr later
14. Private reply Bluesky 1 hr later
15. tranquiltortoise82.bsky.social Bluesky 2 hr later

    What made you migrate from AWS and eventually drew you to Cloudflare? I am weighing options for web-hosting and it’s a bit overwhelming for a newbie.

16. Fynn Ellie Becker Mastodon 2 hr later

    @zachleat The power of static sites: Switching hosting providers takes hours at most. Redirect configuration is the only thing in my setup that is specific to the current provider. Everything else is just a bunch of HTML files, generated with Eleventy of course, CSS, and images.

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 3 hr later

       @mvsde yes! when I moved my personal web site redirect config was a pain point too

17. cthos 🐱 Mastodon 2 hr later

    @zachleat Which website, Zach?!?! (But yes, most of them I could move very quickly)

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 3 hr later

       @cthos ALL OF THEM 😭 😱 😭 😱 😭 😱 😭 😱

       1. cthos 🐱 Mastodon 3 hr later

          @zachleat which reminds me I do need to figure out what to do with a historical repo I've got on Glitch that I used for some simple JS perf demos a very long time ago.

18. CJ 👨‍💻 Mastodon 2 hr later

    @zachleat I've moved to hosting on BearBlog for my personal site - but I've confirmed their export is easy enough, I could 100% spin up a new 11ty site in a matter of a few hours with the data if I needed to (although I use that platform explicitly so I'm not messing with code or formatting on that site).

    The website I maintain for an org as a hobby project, that's all 11ty and could be migrated in minutes like everyone else has said :D

    Now, the sites I maintain professionally? Those are all on various CMS platforms and would be a nightmare to move...but I don't even want to think about that.

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 3 hr later

       @roguefoam the CMS moat is real 😅

19. Tobias Fedder Bluesky 3 hr later

    Excellent question! So I had to look up the TTL of my domain’s A record: 150 s.
    Okay, okay, maybe add 15 min to set up a new server,
    plus — obviously — the number of days until I notice my web site is down.

    Thanks @11ty.dev

20. Thomas Maria Helzle Mastodon 3 hr later

    @zachleat
    Thanks to eleventy, our two main websites could be probably re-uploaded (old-style manual drag-and-drop here ;-) ) with no real editing needed in 5 minutes to half an hour depending on upload speed (due to the self-hosted videos).
    We have zero external dependencies.

    Hosted in Germany they should be okay for now...

    So it would mostly depend on provider switching speed... ;-)

21. Sara Joy Mastodon 3 hr later

    @zachleat that reminds me that I need to find/build a guestbook solution that doesn't rely on Netlify's Forms

22. Ben Delarre Mastodon 3 hr later

    @zachleat does it include the time required to remember the credentials to the ftp I used once 6years ago and never looked at since?

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 3 hr later

       @bendelarre **YES** 😅

23. Cyril Mastodon 3 hr later

    @zachleat a change in a TOML file, Hugo build and ftp upload (did it a week ago to switch from GitHub Pages to my own server)

24. ThomasAPowell Mastodon 3 hr later

    @zachleat yep great observation. One of the numerous software ilities is portability. In the webdev case there are oddities. I think many webdevs have become too accustomed to modern framework limits esp framework + hosting plays (vercel / Next side eye) means you must accept limited or no portability as the price of admission. It’s like a roach motel or Hotel California philosophy - devs can check in but they can’t check out. The weird part is many seem just fine with that!?!

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 3 hr later

       @thomasapowell portability is never an urgent problem until it is VERY URGENT problem 😅

25. Matt Fantinel Mastodon 4 hr later

    @zachleat it would take me about a month to gather the willpower to do it. Then it'd take like 15 minutes + however long it takes for DNS to update

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 5 hr later

       @fantinel so about the same amount of time it takes me to write a medium length email

    2. McNeely Mastodon 5 hr later

       @fantinel @zachleat I can feel this one in my soul 😅

26. Austin Gil Bluesky 5 hr later

    NGL, @coolify.io makes it super easy. Probably within a day:
    - Setup new host
    - install coolify with 1 .sh command
    - connect my git repo
    - deploy

    I guess I'd also have to fiddle with dns, but @heyandras.dev has done a real good job on this :)

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 5 hr later

       nice!

       1. Austin Gil Bluesky 10 hr later

          Yeah, give it a try some time. It supports all sorts of run times too.

          I probably missed a step or two above, but in the theme or portability, when you own your own server and deployment software, it's really easy to move from one vps to another :)

    2. Andras Bacsai Bluesky 1 day later

       💜

27. Dave Rupert Bluesky 5 hr later

    I extremely over-index on this... but the world keeps proving me right over and over that it's a good idea to have this kind of agility.

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 5 hr later

       You’re doing it right! There is no such thing as “too portable”

28. elliot Bluesky 6 hr later

    a few minutes, depending on upload/download speeds and DNS

    only because my site is fully static since it was generated with 11ty! thanks for making such a cool thing, I love plain html and css, but it's such a pain to do everything manually without such a nice static site generator

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 6 hr later

       you’re very welcome!! 🙌

29. Cory Dransfeldt Mastodon 6 hr later

    @zachleat A few hours (or less). It's a LAMP server with some extensions and cron jobs. My setup script spits out the configs for me to copy and paste. I got tired of the lack of portability inherent in writing against host-specific APIs.

    1. Cory Dransfeldt Mastodon 6 hr later

       @zachleat Actually, I should update that so it spits out a script to do that all automatically.

       1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 6 hr later

          @cory automation can save us

          1. Cory Dransfeldt Mastodon 6 hr later

             @zachleat Automation and PHP.

30. Stuart Langridge Bluesky 6 hr later

    A day, roughly. I know this because I had to when my previous host started redirecting URLs randomly to porn sites (!) I immediately bailed to Mythic Beasts, who I’ve been very happy with since :)

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 6 hr later

       …WHAT

       1. Stuart Langridge Bluesky 6 hr later

          Yup. It was apparently upstream of them: my host used godaddy and they were the ones causing the problem. community.cloudflare.com/t/redirectin... has a record of it. But I was, not surprisingly, out the door as fast as my legs would carry me.

          1. Stuart Langridge Bluesky 6 hr later

             Not happy about it

             1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 6 hr later

                that is incredibly *WILD*

          2. Pier Bluesky 5 days later

             Godaddy is the devil

31. Josh Collinsworth Bluesky 8 hr later

    Fun thought exercise. I'd have to rethink my contact form and find a new way to handle redirects, but aside from that (which wouldn't be a big deal), I could be moved in a lunch break, I think.

    Honestly I'd spend *way* more time figuring out where to move than actually doing it.

32. Syllie Bluesky 9 hr later

    Yes! It is something I discuss with my clients too. Prevent lock-in and choose wisely. There are still companies that offer a great 'first bill deal' and bet on it being too much of a hassle to leave so they rack up the pricing the next bill by 500% or more. At least separate services.

33. Bob Monsour Bluesky 10 hr later

    It would depend on how much time I need to spend pointing to new name servers.

    1. SimonCox Bluesky 16 hr later

       Exactly this. But I also still have some apache hosting I could ftp the site to in 5 mins and then do the switch, so loads of options.
       Never felt this resilient before #11ty.

       Also I am sort of interested in exploring a solar powered self hosted server one day for the shits and giggles.

       1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 5 days later

          Amazing 😍

          1. SimonCox Bluesky 5 days later

             It gets better - my personal site deploys to both Cloudflare and Netlify every time. I have immediate backup with a dns change if anything goes pants up.

34. Andy Bell Bluesky 17 hr later

    I reckon piccalil.li could be in a new home and live within the hour because of cloudflare dns

35. Matt Kane Bluesky 18 hr later

    This was one of the worst aspects of original Remix: switching hosts required replacing multiple files throughout the site. The best way was usually to create a whole new site from the new host's template and copy over the pages.

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 4 days later

       oof!

36. zettberlin Bluesky 18 hr later

    Whithin 30 minutes plus content download time...
    Effectively migration of one of our sites at hand would thus take about 8h.

    We build web applications for planning, building and managing infrastructure and forestation, mapping, statistics, controlling etc...

37. Kilian Valkhof Bluesky 19 hr later

    An hour? Zach have you *heard* of DNS??

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 4 days later

       well, portability during an outage is a bigger problem 😅

38. Matthias Ott Bluesky 5 days later

    Also: how long would it take to *redesign* your site?
    (Asking for a friend … 😂)

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 5 days later

       don’t you dare plant that thought in my brain

39. Pier Bluesky 5 days later

    Minutes for static sites. Just drag and drop and wait for DNS to propagate.

    Apps... it would depend on the app. Between hours and days. Usually just finding a new container hosting.

    1. Pier Bluesky 5 days later

       I do have a single app that is deeply coupled to Cloudflare Workers and KV and for that I have no answer.

       I was hoping Deno Deploy KV would be the answer but that's apparently gone now.

40. Stefan Baumgartner Bluesky 5 days later

    Thanks to 11ty, Zach, I was able to move it to a new host within minutes, Zach, waiting for DNS to catch up, Zach.

    Multiple times.

    1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 5 days later

       Amazing!