Webhosting, with letsencrypt

Lounge
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Hi!

I need to look for a new webhost for my (static) personal website, which includes my project Rapid Photo Downloader. I’ve been using DreamHost for the past 4 years but their price to me is set to rise dramatically to $214.80 for two years, so I’m looking at alternatives. Do folks around here have suggestions for a webhost that provides seamless letsencrypt integration?

I found a list of providers here: Let’s Encrypt Supported “Free SSL” Shared Hosting List

The only one of them that I’m familiar with on that list is SiteGround, who I used some years ago now.

Thanks in advance.

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Right now I’m running my static sites on digital ocean, which offers a $5/mo VM. Vultr can get as cheap as $2.50/mo.

Possibly we could pull you onto the Stable Host site that currently hosts the pixls site, but I’ll defer to @patdavid on that.

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Yes, I’d be happy to host on the stablehost web server we’re using for pixls.us (main site).

What would you need to host, just rsync access to a dir? Are you using a CI server to build things by chance?

If the traffic isn’t much we could also consider hosting on the discuss server, but I’ll want to ask @darix first.

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Hey thanks very much guys, it’s very kind of you. I actually got myself a Digital Ocean $5 a month instance recently so I could experiment with the VPN setup suggested by Jim Salter / Ars Technica. I just assumed needing to keep on top of keeping the bad guys out of the VM would mean using it for something serious like a web server would be a PITA. It’s been almost 15 years since I had to configure Apache. But maybe I should give it a go and see how it works out. If it proves stable and doesn’t suck up a lot of time then perhaps it will be fine.

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I’d be happy to share my nginx config that works with the let’s encrypt client.

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@paperdigits do you advise the use of nginx over Apache? It makes little difference to me as at this point, given how much time has passed since I was messing around with apache :wink: I see there are Digital Ocean tutorials for using lets encrypt with both servers.

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I think they’ll both work perfectly well.

Apache has the advantage of having automatic config with certbot, a very popular and easy let’s encrypt client.

Nginx has the advantage of being lighter and has a much easier config file syntax. Certbot integrates pretty easily.

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I run a forum from a DO droplet with Ubuntu 16.04 Server. Installing LetsEncrypt was a breeze.

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I’m running on digital ocean as well. The performance is not amazing but nginx is pretty efficient so I can still handle ~100’000 visitors/month on a 5 $ droplet.

Regarding security, if you just run a webserver like nginx it’s a fairly small attack surface. Configure unattended security upgrades, disable any (external) services you don’t need like email, choose a strong password and you are reasonably safe.

If you want to host something like wordpress, that’s a very different story of course.

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Thanks everyone. My two sites are up and running on Digital Ocean using nginx. The Qualsys SSL test gives the sites an A, which I’m happy with.

And btw @patdavid to answer your question I’m still rocking along with the by now ancient Quanta Plus(!) While it doesn’t know about scp and friends, it has a nice uploader nonetheless. So I use Quanta Plus in a VM in combination with sshfs on my desktop OS to mount the remote server locally. A little convoluted, but it works.

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From your local pixls.us admin … hosting a static files page is so low resource that you can probably run it on a rpi. so i wouldn’t worry about that. I can second using nginx over apache in such setups.

For lets encrypt i am using dehydrated. A simple shell script based client, which has cron support. and hook scripts to deploy the new certs.