Host your own Vercel

welcome to syntax today we are having an episode that is rallying against the $20 of month per user hosting Services out there we are going to be talking about hosting your own platform as a service which is everybody loves these amazing services that you pay $20 a month uh per user for because they compile your code they deploy them they do all that good stuff for you but they get expensive really quickly especially now that the VC money is drying up it seems like everybody is jacking uh up the rates for that type of thing so Scott has gone off the deep end and he has learn the word kubernetes yes and lots of other scary things uh and we're going to take a look at like hosting your own websites but but even more than that right like like hosting your own thing that will do the auto build for you right yes absolutely yeah and and we we'll be going deep on what some options here and maybe uh some of the pain points that I hit or or just some interesting things uh but if you want to host your own pass without being out on your ass you have to have sec you have to have software monitoring to make sure that your software is functioning as expected and you know it does a really great job Sentry sentry.io or sentry.io syntax actually is the new URL for us oh yeah check it out yeah check it out you can give them a try this podcast is presented by centry but let me tell you if you have any sort of errors that need fixing in your software and let's face it we all know you do yeah Sentry is the perfect tool to help you fix those errors especially if they're in production before your users have to send you an email saying hey the thing's broken you already know it's broken you wrote it but you know it's broken because Sentry told you it's broken so let's get into it here let's let's talk about it so what what are these things first and foremost a pass as you mentioned a platform as a service you've probably used a lot of these versel render netlify Heroku um digital oceans app platform there's a ton of these things you know you kind of get the vibe where you log in you connect your GitHub you tell it which repo you want it to go you potentially give it your build commands or where these things are located bingo bango the whole thing goes up onto the internet with a a custom domain then you get a free SSL you you you connect your DNS records to it you have your environmental variables in your groups and then you have a website online you didn't have to do anything set up to do that you didn't have to manage your enginex server uh or enginex is enginex a server is that a correct way to say that Wes yeah yeah enginex is a a web server that will handle incoming requests and do SSL certificates and you're not engine X doesn't actually run your code it will pass it through to your actual your your applications web server but enginex or caddy or Apache sits in front of your application to handle in requests we've done a couple shows on it as well yeah it's funny for most of my career uh I did use a lot of Hosting my own stuff via enginex or even Apache and for the most part I just did what it told me to they weren't necessarily things I got too deep into um but you don't have to deal with any of that stuff because I personally those were the worst aspects of Hosting my own code was dealing with that stuff so Along Came you know I think netlify was maybe one of the first ones that people tried where you connect and you just get up and running that was like super duper easy or Heroku even before that Heroku is maybe a little bit less simple than netfi netfi super simple and then you had companies like digital ocean render and versell coming in a little bit later to try to uh do those in a different way versel is now I think I think verel was before forsel used to be called zeit I'm pretty sure they were before and they used to be only no J hosting as well no serverless uh and they they totally flipped it and let me tell you I was at zit day when the serverless platform was announced I spoke oh yeah yeah man history in the making and we love these Services we joke about them getting really expensive but at the end of the day these services in in order to make money they cannot simply sell you the raw cost of using it like AWS you're paying for actually how much compute you're using at the end of the day and for a lot of websites that is very that pennies um and it it turns out that charging People based on actual usage is not a very good business model um and you can make a lot more money by charging them $20 for everybody who needs to be able to log in per month and or just like like for example I'll pick my my bone with render is I've been on render for probably three or four years I pay them thousands of dollars a year and they recently switched it from I log in I pay for however many servers I want I can Auto scale so I I I say I have two servers at a minimum I can scale up to five and then the the traffic that I get it'll it'll scale up more servers as I need it and scale them down as as I don't need them it'll load balance it all for me and then render switched and now you have to pay for $20 a month just to have an account to turn the button back on um so that's an extra 240 bucks a year for me simply to to do that and a lot of these other hosts are also now going in the regard of like you just you just pay for monthly like neon kind of did this but neon is just saying like people don't know how much it's going to cost them and if you tell them it's going to cost this much for a thousand reads and rights like that's a really good point is like I don't know how much like just tell me it's going to be 20 bucks a month and then I'll use it so we understand that as well um but I do feel like the bills on a lot of these hosting platforms especially if you've got side projects and you're not of course people are people were telling me if you can't afford $20 a month then you shouldn't be in business like of course I can afford $20 a month to host this thing but it's the we're always looking out for the the podcast listeners and whatnot of like if you have a little application it shouldn't run away from you where all of a sudden you realize holy crap I'm spending a couple thousand bucks to host these side projects yeah and and so Wes it's funny you touched on a lot of things I had in the Y section in your in your uh little rant there and and we'll go back to some of that stuff I really appreciate it R though because I agree with you 100% before we get any further on the what side of things I do want to Define kubernetes here for the average listener this is not for the kubernetes professional I don't need your will actes about this um it's basically a control center for managing containers of applications you've all used these Services where you can hit Plus on a container to scale it horizontally or vertically those types of things you can add more resources quickly you can uh add more containers you have multiple of them that are you know fault uh tolerant so if one goes down you know they're sent to the next one this is kubernetes not not saying that every time you've used that it's kubernetes but this is what kubernetes does it handles scaling fixing sharing resources making your applications more resilient um can I ask a question for The Listener how is that different than Docker Docker has a thing called like Docker swarm Maybe yeah yeah it's I don't I don't I don't know the intricacies of why it's different it's very similar and it it functions in a similar space in fact when I was learning about um one of the services kulfi um when they weren't using kubernetes they suggested using Docker swarm as an alternative so I I would love for what we have a a guest coming on David Flanigan coming on yeah yeah he's going to talk to us about this let's put that on the big old list of questions for David because um that's not something I know the intricacies of okay so the the thing I was asking about like a Docker container is a single instance of a virtual server that is running kubernetes Architects not Docker containers but it architex multiple containers so it can it can scale them up and scale them down and do all that good stuff we're not again we're not kubernetes experts but that's how I understand it yes and that and I think that's mostly what you need to know when we talk about kubernetes as a concept in this episode it's like hey you know that interface that you've probably seen where you can scale up or down an interface like that's that's it's not the interface itself but that's really what the concept of working in kubernetes is um so as you mentioned it's really like death by a thousand Services here right you know I I host a lot of side projects and one thing that you used to be able to do very frequently Heroku used to get like five free um d I think they called them uh many of these Services meteor when it launched had a free like hobby hosting plan it used to be free to throw up a node server somewhere and not have great performance or anything but just as a proof of concept but obviously just like a lot of things crypto miners have ruined that experience for most of us so we no longer have that many uh places where we can just go quickly throw up side projects and many of you are left with maybe pay paying seven bucks a month or something for a node server for some side project that you don't even care about you just want online and and and so to me like you've mentioned like yeah you could toss these things on you know paper usage situations but sometimes you just want a server to dump a bunch of stuff on you know uh and you want it to be able to be performant and work well and actually you know be much cheaper yeah I missed the days of I still have a PHP server I I was laughing the other day that I have a a blue host PHP server and I'm not hosting any of my own projects on I have my dad's website a couple of his clients my wife's website and I was like man I at at the at the time at like the height of my WordPress days I was freaking running like 40 apps on a single like $6 a month PHP server and that was the best you know just throw it up there and even for like the longevity of the web like people say oh just throw it on netlify or whatever and I love netlify but the time will come when netlify realizes we need to make more money and what are they going to do they're going to say we're making some changes to our free tier and the this is the way that it happens this happens at all of the places this is how these companies get people on boarded is they have VC money they give away lot of free services everybody gets it on there and then pull the rug out from under you yeah y yeah yeah and absolutely I think that is a big concern here and and I think one of the things you even mentioned about like WordPress hosting right we all host WordPress sites in and maybe some of you aren't right maybe you're all working on application development but I still host WordPress sites and if people ask me where's the best place to host a WordPress site I don't know like a Blu host I know you hate Blu host not blue don't don't Blu no I know I said blue house because I knew would uh get a reaction out of you you know what I went to one of your old videos because the syntax YouTube channel you should subscribe I was like I was like I wonder like what are some old videos on this thing because it's the the we changed the level up tutorials YouTube channel to syntax one so I went back to like one of the very first YouTube channel and it's little Scott saying hey guys uh you could get a blue h house for three bucks a month that was the price way back then yeah it was it was not only that cheap but they paid me $100 per mention per sign up I made Bank on the blue host referrals for many years made Bank on it yes I know and and honestly I did host a lot of stuff on blue host so it's not like I was just hucking it um but yeah me too either way you know like you want to host a WordPress site real quick for friends and family they need to something what are you going to tell them to do pay pay seven bucks a month pay 14 bucks a month or you can get a one-click install with some of these services and and so we'll be talking a little bit about some of these services in just a second here so uh maybe hold on hold on your horses just a little bit but in in reality your app shouldn't have to be bringing in money if you just want to throw up a side project and I think some of the people who might hear this like hosting your own stuff on your own virtual private server but I I like all my my things my um SSL certific stuff I like my um Auto Deploy on commits I like pipel preview URLs and stuff like that we'll check it out a lot of these services do exactly that some of which do so in a very nice UI some of which do so just on the commandline or some of them just through configuration files but you can get the netlify experience for anything note apps WordPress like think about it this way you could have your own server you could do a oneclick spin up an app right a pocket base a redus a a MySQL all on your same server in just a couple of seconds and connect to it private privately under like one cost which to me if I'm working on a bunch of projects that's super compelling because why well I might not want to pay whatever the extra service for a private service on render to host a reddis service for my side project but I still want redus and I still want uh cash for it well now I can just add it to my already existing server under those same resources and I think that's like a a very compelling reason to potentially add some of the stuff because if you do want to add any of these little Services it adds up and even if it's free to start you have no idea if it's going to remain free once you start adding things like this yeah I I don't know I I found it to be pretty compelling and the thing I was scared about most was losing access to the the niceties I had from those platform as a services but it it turns out that you can get all of that and I will say off the Jump if you have any platform as a service that are either open source paid or the type of thing that you can host yourself I'm interested in hearing about more of these because I have a list of several of these uh Kubo kifi cap Rover doku piku kuber and Acorn a bunch of words there right oh they all sound like Pokemon they do sound like Pokemon which of these sounds the most like Pokemon cap Rover or probably daku piku that's like a Star Wars thing piku yeah obviously piku cuber sounds like a Mario cuber does sound like a Pokemon though too and so does Kubo honestly all of these could really pass for Pokemon Kubo sounds like the oh dude you got a Kubo Wes here is a game for our uh live show Pokemon or web service oh I like that cuaro that's okay all right we're adding it uh by the way react Miami we're GNA be there so maybe we should add that to react Miami you should grab tickets to that right now everybody if you would like to play Pokemon or web service it could be a continuation of one of our fan favorites is a what what do we say it's like a npm package or or uh a thing or both yeah npm package or that was it was like is this a carbon fiber road bike or a npm package for maintaining dependencies that was that was really funny one we did we should do that one again one of my favorite segments cuz writing it is just as fun as experiencing it with the audience um okay so let's get into these players there there's a huge amount of variability in this world some of these contain uis some of them contain uh just CIS some of them have paid add-ons yeah so a lot here um so these services that you're going to go through these are not like a SST or a flight control which is these are this is not software to deploy to AWS or maybe it is actually um these are just like like literally run your own server it's not serverless it's not scale up and down it's just something that will you go and get a server somewhere or like I'll walk into my server room and I have a uh a little disc station sonology running there right like I could install these on my sonology and literally host it in my house if I wanted to yes absolutely and in fact there's there's a lot of people that do do that but you can also just install these on a VPS somewhere I've been seeing a lot of people talk about installing some of these on arm seems to be like a big topic there's not a lot of cloud arm 64 hosts oh like arm you mean like like like the processor that's in the MacBooks and in correct Chromebooks and your phone probably some people are even offering hosting on a Mac specifically I think it's like using Mac minis or something but that's usually pretty expensive if you if you use GitHub um GitHub actions and you want it to run on a Mac it's like 10 times the cost yeah and and I think that's why people are going with with arm what's interesting is that like head kind of seems to be the the cheapest best option there but I found them to be kind of awful to work on and and you know a lot of people really like them so I'm not I'm not talking trash about hetner but as a American it like literally asked for blood of my firstborn child to get signed up with a a cloud account there so and I don't mean literally lit literally I know that's a a trigger for some people um so you can host these things in a variety of places of which can be very cheap you can host them on a digital oce droplet and get going in no time now I'm still a little bitter about the CSS tricks thing so I might be looking at other places to host but a a shared arm 64 based CPU starts at 4 lb a month for or no those are Euros sorry that's the Euro symbol it starts at four a month American yes I know for that for two CPUs 4 gigs of RAM 40 gigs of dis space and 20 terab of bandwidth so that's really reasonable for an arm server um and so again you can cost an arm it doesn't cost an arm and a leg does it cost 64 arms yeah that's good that's good that's good I like J and I like joke um okay Kubo let's let's talk about Kubo based on the name you might be guessing this one has something to do with kubernetes and it absolutely does uh Kubo is basically a self-hosted Heroku alternative it uses material design from 1998 I know that didn't exist then but it uses the old school material design aesthetic and it honestly I I I'm trying to be nice to a lot of these they're open source software but unfortunately this one like does a lot of cool things and would be very nice but it does look like it was clearly designed by engineer so if you're the type of person who requires a uh fancy UI or a UI that is you know doing a lot for you you know this one's maybe not for you what is that about material design how every time I hit a material design app I'm like a this thing's going to suck like well why or or is it just is it just tired is it a tired UI tired even home assistant uses material UI and I'm just like H I like I liked material when it came out and that was like 10 years ago or something at this point that's wild uh it came out a long time ago and so I think that's really just it is it just looks old and that's fine but this this thing is really easy there's like really quick add-ons to get going with just about anything you want and that's kind of the thing you're going to see from a lot of this stuff like if you want to spin up a rabbit mq or a reddis or a mongod DB it's like really super easy to you can throw your databases in there too bro you can throw anything in here and most of these like oneclick services to do so um which is fantastic um so kubar certainly an option I don't think you need to get too deep into kubernetes it's it's basically you're just using a either a curl command to install it you're you're logging in you're getting going this one is kubernetes based again I I don't think you need no kubernetes to use this uh coolify is the one that I've been seeing suggested the most and is the one that I've used the most out of all of these a cool fi. in my experience has the best UI of any of these um what you'll see is a lot of the really high-powered ones or the really interesting ones are all either CLI or configuration based but if you're like me I like logging into my versel dashboard and seeing in the red and green um indicators if something's failed to deploy I like clicking on that and looking at the logs there I don't want to do command line for everything and so that's really where I think coolify shines is that the um UI even though the CSS is in flux the creator has mentioned that it's it's in flux right now it still looks really good compared to most things out there it feels modern and for the most part it feels like using a versel type of situation where again it's not like a serverless platform but when you you connect your GitHub I have my GitHub connected I then get to see all of my repos I select the repo I want I tell it my build command I click go and it has the exact same style of tabs interfaces all right you got your EnV variables right there you got your build logs you have automatic deployment on push you have SSL and domains without having to do anything to set it up with it like automatically gives you the SSL just like any of these things and most of these platforms will let me be clear about that but you do get that experience that you might be more used to with this and I think the the thing that I really like the most about it is that I was able to get up and running on a coolify instance in like 15 minutes or less so I I spun up a droplet on a digital oce I ran I or I sshed in I ran a curl command I logged in I created my account connected my GitHub deployed my site really oh you you take out half those steps and it's the same as any other platform as a service right and so coolify I'm just looking they have a pricing page this is something that they host themselves or you can host it yourself yeah so I think there's it would be like you're using render vers hosting render yourself okay okay so if you do pay basically kify is the controls regardless of what you do you bring your own servers but coolify is the controls for architecting and and controlling your your actual servers and you can either run it run the controls on their server for five bucks a month or you can host the whole open- Source part of kify as well is that right yep yep what are you are you paying for the controls or did you actually install coolify on the digital ocean droplet yourself I installed kify on the droplet myself and it was one it was a one Comm it was a copy and paste command hit enter and then log in and then but you sent me a URL that had kify in it I I thought oh he's paying for something something here how come the URL has coolify in it I don't know I I I since moved that off of the uh domain let me even check that because I I've assigned that an actual domain now let me even check what that domain was it's probably doing some like um like tunneling similar to how like a enro or cloudflare tunnel Works where it gives you an external DNS and it knows how to tunnel to your actual server in case there's like a what's the word where Network traffic can't get in why am I blanking on this a fir wall there's a firewall in the way yeah firewall we haven't heard that term in a long time yeah I you know I don't know where it's getting the domain I just clicked it to generate a generated domain which I probably shouldn't have done because I think it automatically saved that generated one and um what's interesting about it is it's it's like some weird generated string then my iy IP address. ssli doio so who knows what's going on there but you know once I I just copied and pasted my actual domain in there I pointed my cloud flare to it based on the DNS instructions I was given and it just worked so you know I didn't have a um I don't know I had no issues getting up and running with my domain on it or even just getting you that quick little domain which connected again straight to to my box here so yeah I found coolify to be really really nice and and to give you like just a generalized idea man if I want to spin up a WordPress site for instance I come into my coolify I select the project I want I click new resource and then it gives me a big old list of resources to install do you want to install uh MB on here do you want to install a ghost blog do you want to install my SQL just click it it deploys it gives you a URL for it and you can connect to it privately man that's great I got to say it's super seems nice and one of the cooler things about coolify 2o is that yeah you can do like a Docker swarm with it so you can get that that you know more more secure or or so not just like it's not just a toy for hosting side projects you could use you could host your whole infrastructure on this yes you could host your whole infrastructure on this and you can specify which server you want any of your services to run on so even if you have kify running on droplet a you could spin up a droplet b and without even doing anything other than connecting the two within kify you could say hey deploy this app to droplet B and run it on droplet B so that way it is always going to be in its own droplet in its own server that you can manage its resources separately so I I think it the the UI for this stuff is really nice and it ends up being really a good experience a much better experience than I was expecting from free open-source software that is you know doing so much this is like a a really cool project um next one is Cap Rover cap Rover this one seems really nice uh I don't have much to say on it because I haven't tried it but it does seem obviously the UI if you click on it it's a little less a little less pretty but that doesn't you know that doesn't disqualify anything it it does all the stuff you want it to do it gives you going with a um SSL for for free and easy gives you Docker swarm um gives you a g a gooey lets you do one click to install a bunch of stuff and it is it's basically saying hey man uh we know this stuff can get expensive so we're going to make it really easy for you to host your stuff I found cap Rover to be fine it's not the one I used for my my experience but based on their docs it seems like a decent option doku is one that I saw when people were talking about kifi or any of these there's all do doku was the webstorm of these where there's always one person being like you got to use doku doku is the one uh I I installed this do you want you installed this on on what yeah a probably two years ago I went through this whole uh these services are are getting expensive I wish that there was some sort of self-hosted Heroku or self-hosted whatever and uh what's interesting about railway and Heroku and digital ocean app platform is they all use these things called app packs which are just descriptions of how to set up a um how to set up a server Heroku has made all of their sort of images open source and different Services can actually use them and doku uses those app packs and uh I thought it was pretty cool at the time I just I just kept hitting like little like config errors and whatever and I just I said screw it after about four hours of trying to get it run so it's probably better now yeah and there's also one you'll see Nick packs a lot Nix packs yes that's like the new version of the Heroku app packs yes and so NX pack you know that that's kind of what it does and you can use NYX packs with most of these or whatever the docker config for these is I'm a gooey kind of guy so for me I'm like I'm typing in my my text boxes and hit and save I know that is going to you know not be the way that many of you like to work and you like your packs and stuff like that and that's cool very usable uh it might be something I eventually get into here who knows I'm going down a a slippery slope of Hosting my own stuff next thing you know I'm going to be I'm going to be actually knowing what to do with kubernetes so uh doku is a CLI based if you would like a UI for your doku instance I guess you would call it for your doku you have to pay $849 for a license so if you like a UI dku is probably not for you but if you're the type of person who likes to do things through a CLI it is very Heroku like in that sort of way I think it's a good option it it's it seems like it's very well-liked the people who who like it seem to like it I do like I said I like to see those uis and things um but it does seem to make it really easy to not just do the general stuff that you want to do but um to do some fancy stuff as well so you know give doku a try I think it's a well-liked did you look into loku at all leoku loku so because doku it's probably daku if if we're thinking about it cuz it's Doer right yeah maybe yeah like of of course there's a CLI and there's apis for interacting with it so it looks like somebody wrote a uh it's hasn't been updated in two years I don't know if it's it's any good or not but uh someone else wrote a another UI for for daku it makes sense that they would charge 850 bucks because for like an a business that's spending like hundreds of thousands of dollars on Sur like a a little skin to throw on and to click on their things like the 850 bucks is nothing to a lot of companies but if you're a Indie maker that's that's a big uh chunk of change especially if the point of doing this is to save money that's I think if you're the type of person who is getting deeper into the stuff and wants the most out of it doku seems like a great option it does support arm 64 and the reason why I'm saying that is because piku is the next one and piku was inspired by doku at as a means of supporting arm 64 to run specifically on a Raspberry Pi cluster so this one seems like it might be a little bit more hobbyist project type of situation you want to throw something up onto your local Raspberry Pi or perhaps a p cluster seems like puu is designed for that and is doku like again I haven't used it is CLI based there is no UI for it uh kuber or cuber um cu. cloud or kuber do Cloud I guess it could be kuber but it's with a c cu. Cloud deploy your apps on kubernetes easily it has no UI as far as I could tell uh config based you might not need to know kubernetes I have as a note but it feels like you might and I say this because I have not tried kuber Cloud I you know I I I didn't want to get too deep into kubernetes I wanted to know what it was I wanted to get my self up and running and I didn't want to turn turn this into a oh boy we're going to have to like really get deep into the weeds but Cooper Cloud does look kind of nice that said the configuration does scare me a little bit it does seem like the feature set for this thing is really good and last but not least is acorn acorn has a pretty website but is uh CLI based there is no UI for it again and their docs show you getting up and running with python you know it it doesn't feel like the option that most people who are like just looking for a netfi alternative will want to pick so some of these whether it is cuber Acorn doku Kubo some of these feel like they might be for the more intense use case rather than coolify which seems like oh hey I want to just get what I had going with uh render.png you'll probably just say hey coolify works for me it's easy to get going easy to install works everywhere and uh is is pretty effortless sweet yeah I'm going to try throw this on my on my Nas and I'm trying to look at how to do it though because like it's not a Docker image because it it can make Docker images right well we should have the creative of coolify on here to talk a little bit he's been uh he and I been chatting a bit on Twitter and he's a really cool guy and he really seems to love this project that he's working on so I wonder if there's like a VM image I can install cuz I hit that with home assistant as well as I initially installed home assistant as a Docker image but a lot of the good home assistant plugins are in themselves Docker images and you can't run a Docker in a Docker so I had to switch my home assistant to running as a VM and then the VM can then spawn many doer images yeah what a world what a world go back to my variables in JavaScript yeah I know and and if you're out there you know you are an expert in this type of thing or you have more questions reach out to us by by all accounts I'm a hobbyist who just started experimenting with this stuff and Wes has not used it so this is what I have found if you have contradictory information or have found better or different things hit us up anywhere we're we're happy to to have that discussion in fact we're going to be having David flan on who does a lot of kubernetes I mean that's like his thing and if you have any questions about this stuff by all means let us know and we'll try to get those in front of David somebody who's actually an expert in this area that we can really ask all the questions too so again the challenges here with hosting your own pass platform as a service getting things like high availability you know that you could get just by hucking some cash at a a render server or something these things do require kubernetes knowledge or one of these more intense services or getting into Docker swarm I don't even know what the higher availability picture is for Docker storm or swarm I I have no idea I have not looked into it so it's not as just as easy as logging in and clicking a button often times you might have to learn a little bit about Docker and kubernetes that is a concern I have not had to get there yet but I can see getting my foot in the door into this space as being like yeah you might potentially have to learn some of this stuff at least to a little bit you have to keep your server up to date still you know I don't know things have exploits Linux has exploits or whatever comes up whatever you're running your you you still got to keep this stuff stuff up to date yeah remember remember heartbeat yes what was that five six years ago heartbeat came out and at the time a lot of people were still managing their own an genics so we all had to figure out how to be CIS admins and go up update our servers and that's always kind of scary too updating anything with the database definitely scary and another thing is like if you want to run things on the edge this is not for you you know um this is tossing up side projects this is potentially hosting your own cash servers or stuff like running on the edge of your bed more like it yeah I don't I don't get that what you're trying to say there okay oh like it's not like the op opposite of the edge which is high availability running in data centers close to the user the opposite of that is a PC underneath your desk or uh on sitting on a laptop sitting on your bed that's serving it out to the world yes do not close this laptop it runs the entire company oh that's apparently uh just like a funny story is uh GitHub Pages runs what's the the Ruby based thing that that runs on GitHub Pages if you want to have like a site Builder um on GitHub Pages Jackal so the get up Pages you can obviously host just HTML but they also support this thing called Jackal which will is a static site Builder and it will build the website for you um apparently Jackal was running on just like a PC under someone's desk far into uh uh I I think that actually came from when we had the folks from get on that story I thought that was really interesting that like it became a very popular feature uh all well just running on a PC and somebody somebody's desk and that's a good lesson you don't always need the serverless function or whatever that people are talking about as being the thing you need sometime you just straight up need a node server and that's good enough let me tell you the the app that I have running on my kify server loads in 50 milliseconds and uh that's pretty dang fast okay so you know people talk about you need this you need that hey you you don't always need this and that sometimes you just need what works right so uh my final thoughts I tried coolify I liked it it was easy to get up and running I'm going to continue to host stuff there I may move it off of digital lotion because I'm a salty salty man I one one more thing I'm just you've been talking about this I didn't even realized like servers could run arm 64 like I realized it but I didn't realize it was so readily available because that ready available is the problem oh it's just starting to pop up um because like in lots of cases they're faster at running things like uh and with all these like AI models starting to come out where people are trying to we have a show coming up on running AI models locally mhm it's going to be interesting because like you're not going to throw that on a serverless function because sometimes it takes like 3 minutes to to process and run you need a long run running service for that right and I'd be interested to see if people are like okay well we want to run it ourselves but we need to deploy it somewhere so maybe this type of thing is going to become more popular and you know what some of these uh Services out there that offer armed servers so like one of them is scaleway scaleway specifically advertises it itself as uh scale AI models so it's basically like saying hey our servers are good for running AI in the cloud and they they have arm 64 servers now one thing that I've noticed is that most of these are based in Europe and what I haven't found is I haven't found a good solution in the arm space that hosts or has um US based servers hetner has a um what I what was the one I just said the um scale ways scale ways another one I've been suggested is rack nerd although I haven't looked at them at all so I have no idea a lot of these places do offer servers in the US but not arm servers and I wonder why that is interesting I wonder if kifi works with like just straight up AWS ec2 uh AWS ec2 is their server full offering let me double check that actually how to deploy coolify on AWS with preconfigured ec2 yeah so it is ec2 okay let's see I mean let me confirm here con preconfigured Ami I don't know what Ami is if you can get it running on ec2 like that might be the cheapest way generally Amazon is the cheapest but people don't necessarily gravitate to it because it is the most painful to to set up which is we've asked this question many times and we've had many different uh flight control on SST is just like why does Amazon not build a versel you know and if if they would put out every single company out of business that is existing in this space that just sits on top of a adws a rapper and everyone's going to say w that's what amplify is if if amplify was as good as versel versel would not be business right there's a reason we all use synx uses for sale I use it for a lot of my projects it's really good people there's a reason we pay up to use it it's because it just works and it's awesome I will say though it's not without its problems I mean we had situations we've had situations because running serverless obviously um oh yeah yeah in in running on versel specifically that you wouldn't happen if you were just running a node server and it's like well do we actually need to be running serverless is that really solving the problems for us if one we're still paying out the butt for it and it's you know because it's not like for sell's cheap no no it's it's not cheap so yeah it really depends we were having issues with the um it was not finding the files in the spel kit adapter um we had some wasm files that were not referenced anywhere and the package we were using just assumed that the wasm file would be beside it but the way that versel bundles things is if it doesn't know that a file exists via the require tree it doesn't included in the actual serverless bundle and we could not for the life of us figure out it looks like spel kit I saw something come over GitHub the spel kit adapter has has fixed that so we need to try it just yet but right now we wrote a if you go into the syntax repo there's a file called why do I need this. JS and it just copy and pastes the file FES into the serverless functions before we deploy I'm just here so I don't get fired. JS I uh I I let me tell you something actually really interesting too before we we move off of this this topic West I like many other people have been working in bun or alternative run times and you get to the situation where you're like does not Lei support bun does render support bun you're at you're you're beholden to the hosting plat if they support these types of things let me tell you here's how I got bun working on kifi I pointed it to my repo the words you are saying right now sorry you got bun working on kifi continue I I got bun it's working on coolify and uh let me just tell you all I had to do was to say bun install whatever and coolify picked it up and automatically installed bun on the system for me so I didn't have to install bun I didn't even have to tell it to install bun it installed bun so yeah I got I got bun running with with no no fuss no mess so yeah I I'm pretty sure kify has an extension called if you ain't got buns hun then it just installs it yeah that's what it is if you ain't got buns hun perfect W no notes oh all right I think that's it this I'm I'm really excited about this I kind of want to try to spin up a a little instance of it and we should say also like people are always like oh you're you're so cheap and whatever we get for sale for free I get I got unlimited neifi account I can host everything for free for the rest of my life uh if I wanted the reason why we talk about this type of stuff is not because I don't want to pay 20 bucks a month these companies give us free hosting you know but the reason we talk about it is because it's it's really interesting and we do think about everyone who's listening to this type of thing and it it's important that we all learn to to host our own servers if we want to throw projects up for free yeah and you might be out there hosting 15 WordPress sites for clients at x amount of bucks a pop when you could be using a service like this to do it much easier for you so I mean it's it there's definitely a lot of situations where I I think developers get into this mode where hey I'm building this so everybody must be building this when in we're all working on different kinds of stuff and different different types of projects and I think it's important to realize hey if if it's not viable for you that's okay I just had the same discussion on on Twitter in fact I had to stop talking on Twitter because people are are wild about HTM X we're like I don't know there's so many people that get so insecure about other tools like bro you don't have to use it nobody's telling you to use it I'm just exploring this thing or talking about these ideas it doesn't mean that all of the sudden these I don't know I asked what types of interactive things are you doing and people had the wildest replies they' be like I need time travel debugging all right what do you need that for oh well I need it that actually is Handy yeah I know it is I know it's really handy but it's only really handy when you're dealing with a lot of data or perhaps you're building something that needs actual undo functionality um it's funny that you say that because I was before you join I was talking to Randy about the the Apple episode and people let us know their their opinions on on Apple and the open web and like it's crazy that I was telling Randy how people get angry all the time at at certain things and if you talk about a certain piece of tech that's not the way they do it then they get very angry and it's I think the the biggest thing is that shows like an inexperienced developer is when someone cannot possibly foresee that people have different problems than they have they have different stack setups than they have like some people say oh yeah like you could just use like a meta framework for absolutely everything and like no people have other some people still need graph apis because they they have many pieces of data coming in like there's so many different problems and so many different instances that need to be solved that you may not be even considering what that looks like yeah I know and I think if if we had Dr uh tulinsky on the show I think she would diagnose it as just being insecure right these people see something they don't know that much about they're going to lash out about it because uh they don't they don't know why other people need it because they don't need it who knows yeah or or I I also think that people think it makes them look smart when they're really opinionated about something yeah some people really love to argue on Twitter yeah it doesn't it doesn't make you look smart at least not to me you know like maybe for for beginners it makes you look look really smart and we've I've said this many times before it's like you often see beginners have lots of opinions on things because it makes makes them look like they they know what they're talking about but in reality you just look like a jerk a lot of times and it's fine to have opinions but there's there's a there's a line there yeah yeah you got to stay open-minded um I I posted a link to a a hacker news that was posted 19 days ago which is oddly enough and says ditching pass why I went back to self-hosting now I found this not only did I find the blog to be interesting but I found the I linked to the comment section specifically there's a lot of discussion around cost actual cost what people are using and what they aren't it's full of typical Hacker News nonsense where people are again arguing about the things but I did find the whole thing to be just an interesting read if this is something you have interest in and again we're going to have David Flanigan on the show who's an expert in in kubernetes stuff so if you have any questions about deeper things here let us know we will pass them along to David because I'm sure we're very curious too we're going to pick his brain so that's it for this episode let's get into sick pcks and uh Shameless plugs Wes do you have any sick pcks you bet I got a really good one for you today and can I can I go run and get it actually you bet yes okay one sec yeah [Music] absolutely all right I just ran all the way upstairs because it is a video podcast now and I want to be able to share what it is and it is what is called a gripstick you got to pull it back it's too close to the camera I got to be one of the makeup influencers there we go uh grip so a grip stick is that doesn't sound right the like I this is a scen on TV the best way to seal your chip bags or um pancake mix or any any sort of plastic or cellophane bag and the way that it works is that you just fold it over chest what are these Chester corn twists Chester's corn twists what is that I don't I don't even know do do you have this guy though they're like oh yeah we have Chester Cheeto yeah we have Chester Cheetah but he's just like the Cheetos guy he's occasionally like a kind of delinquent in commercials yeah he's he's he's kind of a yeah he's definitely a delinquent I would I would say that's it but the way that works is Chip Clips I hate chip Clips you know you you put the clip on it falls off or whatever pain in the butt so these things are called a grip stick and you basically just make a a little um crease and then Z and then it's airtight like I feel like I I might quit my job and be like a a Salesman for this type of thing cuz it's so nice and you can get a pack and like my kid had some cookies in their lunch and they didn't eat the whole pack so what I did is I just grabbed it and threw a little one on this morning and it's like I I can't believe how awesome they are and you can I got them on AliExpress it's like $2 for a pack of like eight or something like that super cheap and it just keeps your food Super Fresh and I've just been like my wife is so sick of me showing her new things that I can grip stick she's like I get it they're they're nice Clips it's not that exciting but I was like Scott will care I'll show Scott and you know what w there you know I've already opened the browser and started searching for them um so yeah I care and I yeah not only do I care I'm going to order some and I definitely see the utility I've always wondered to myself with chip Clips what are these doing besides making the stuff not fall out of the bag when you pick it up like they're not keeping it fresh just by folding over the bag or you know my there's not any better than just crinkling it up and rolling it up it just man what a what a nice little thing there you got there yeah big fan of this well I don't you know I don't necessarily have anything super interesting but you know I will sick pick something that I I have all over my house now that I've been I've probably sick picked this at least once before and sometimes we do repeat sick picks but I have been slowly but surely changing all of my light switches to be the cada I have the the diva which is the one with the dimmer and then the claro which is just the normal Smart Switch or there's the accessory switch I've been putting these things all over my house slowly but surely because they're expensive so I'll buy one or two at a time install it I still have maybe I still probably have a third of the house to do still but I love these smart switches opposed to like I've used smart bulbs in the past whatever but I have my home assistant I have routine set up my wife hates it cuz it shuts off the lights at the kitchen table at 8:00 when she's sitting at the kitchen table sometimes but I got to say um having the dimmer everywhere having these smart routines it it doesn't get any better and the software is fast it's efficient the biggest downside with any of these cassetas anything is is the price so again slowly but surely or if if you're doing a whole bunch at once and you have the cash to spend on it I have found as far as all smart light switches go the cassetas really do seem to be the best yeah I'm I'm a big fan of those ones as well I have I probably have like eight different kinds of light switches cuz I've tried them all and uh by far the worst ones are the wise unfortunately which kills me cuz I love wise as a company but they always always lose Wi-Fi and I have a commercial level Wi-Fi setup at our house so it's not a Wi-Fi uh so yeah don't get the wise ones sick well Shameless plugs I'm going to shamelessly plug the syntax YouTube we're posting we're posting quite frequently and we're going to continue to post there I'm going to be putting out later today it'll be very live by the time you hear this a video on what it's like to code with the Vision Pro on so if you're interested in in VR and coding I have been using it daily I did not want to take it off last night um well or yesterday all day at work I was coding with it on except for when uh Randy and I had our meeting I took it off for that awesome uh I'll shamelessly plug the syntax YouTube channel check it out just go to YouTube Type in syntax podcast or I think that's the best way.com youtube.com syntax FM they have a new URL style structure they change us all around it's at syntax FM rather than SL Channel sluy whatever oh yeah yeah that's good although like search it I think that helps I I was seeing how Mr Beast doesn't link any of his YouTube things anymore because apparently I don't know these like people talking the algorithm but apparently Mak people's experience wor going to search it I know it's so frustrating freaking algorithm hey but while you're there smash that like button ring the bell cook thumbs up on all the videos and tell Wes and I that we both look handsome in the comments we would all love that tell us who's handsomer though all right you don't need catch you later peace peace

Channel: Syntax

Views: 3,928

Keywords: tutorials, cms, html, css, html5, css3, education, free, lessons, tuts, tutorial, learn, software, web development, web developer, developer, web, website

Id: nCWznQ0HY9c

Length: 57min 57sec (3477 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024