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flowerhackThe other day I was chatting with a non-technical guy who was curious about web development, and he asked me: "Say I make a website, and it has everything I want, and I just want it to stay on the internet. What all do I have to do to keep that website up? Is it a daily maintenance thing? weekly? yearly?"
I actually thought this was an interesting question, because there's so many variables at play here, and most of them aren't particularly obvious when you're just starting out. For fun, here's a rundown of some of the perils you'll face if you're "just" trying to keep things running.
* * *
So you've signed up for something like Neocities, and you've put your "helloworld.html" page there. Yay, website!
Except, Neocities is free, which means they can shut down at any time, for any reason, with very little warning. Or maybe no warning at all! It's not like you're paying them, right?
Geocities gave its users six months to try and save all the stuff on their ~38 million webpages back in 2009, which is comparatively generous. Plenty of similar services have only given a few weeks' warning.
Or no warning at all—in high school I got an insane amount of space from a free provider called Cybertoad, and of course the day that I was trying to show off my website to a cute boy was the exact same day that Cybertoad disappeared off the internet, forever, with no warning and no explanation, and to this day I still don't know who they were or why they wanted to give me so much free webspace, albeit temporarily. Alas. (The cute boy was not impressed.)
Okay, so you move to a paid provider. You're giving AWS some money so that you can host helloworld.html on their S3 service for a year. That's well and good, unless! You run out of money. Or the price goes up. Or you didn't set it up for auto-renewal, and you forget to pay again before the year ends. Or you did set up auto-renewal, but your credit card expired this year and you forgot to update it. (Okay, I'm being a little dramatic here; they'll send you reminder emails and have a grace period for renewal if you totally forget to pay, but I'm a total scatterbrain and thus have nearly hit the limit of similar grace periods many times.)
By the way, it's not like you just have to worry about paying AWS. If you want to have myawesomedomain.com, you have to pay for the domain name separately, and renew that every year, too. You'll probably want to buy a WhoisGuard for your domain, too, since letting every rando on the internet know that myawesomedomain.com's owner lives at 123 Pleasant Street may not be the best plan. And if you deal with any sensitive customer information—say, God help you, credit card numbers—then you need an SSL certificate, which also has to be renewed every so often. If you forget any of these, though, don't worry; you're in some good company.
Speaking of sensitive information, as soon as you move away from static content—that is, the moment you let users do anything to the website—the number of things that can go wrong skyrockets. Say you've installed a Wordpress blog, or a phpbb forum—turns out there are lots of mean people who want to hack your blog or forum and fill it up with piles of Viagra ads. (Why is it always Viagra ads? We just don't know.) And since so many people use Wordpress, there are many, many people who spend their time prying through the Wordpress source code, looking for security holes they can exploit. Sure, you can update your Wordpress blog's software, which will protect you from getting hacked, but how do you find out when those updates are released? Wordpress lets you know when you log in if there's an update available, so I sure hope you're logging into your blog every day. phpbb will send you an email. You've never changed your email address, right? (And, by the way, doing those updates can start getting confusing and complicated compared to just setting it up.)
By the way, all those security problems that Wordpress and phpbb have? The computer that your website lives on has these problems, too. Lots of them. Luckily, the people you're paying are supposed to be installing those updates. You do trust the folks you're paying, right?
Though, even if you really trust the guys you're paying, sometimes they'll get tripped up by catastrophic weather or FBI raids, so it's all kind of a wash in the end.
* * *
I guess the big lesson here is that, lots of folks imagine a web site is something like a painting. Someone paints it, you buy it, and then you invite all your friends over to admire how pretty it looks in your living room, and that's that. But it's more like building a house. Or rather, it's like building a house in some alternate universe where time is going by ten times as fast. All these people keep coming in and scuffing up the floor! There's too much junk in the attic! There was a huge flood and now some of the wood's starting to rot away! The kitchen sink is broken!
You can avoid worrying about a lot of these problems, by paying other people to take care of your house, but at the end of the day, someone is doing a lot of work to just keep your site running.
I actually thought this was an interesting question, because there's so many variables at play here, and most of them aren't particularly obvious when you're just starting out. For fun, here's a rundown of some of the perils you'll face if you're "just" trying to keep things running.
So you've signed up for something like Neocities, and you've put your "helloworld.html" page there. Yay, website!
Except, Neocities is free, which means they can shut down at any time, for any reason, with very little warning. Or maybe no warning at all! It's not like you're paying them, right?
Geocities gave its users six months to try and save all the stuff on their ~38 million webpages back in 2009, which is comparatively generous. Plenty of similar services have only given a few weeks' warning.
Or no warning at all—in high school I got an insane amount of space from a free provider called Cybertoad, and of course the day that I was trying to show off my website to a cute boy was the exact same day that Cybertoad disappeared off the internet, forever, with no warning and no explanation, and to this day I still don't know who they were or why they wanted to give me so much free webspace, albeit temporarily. Alas. (The cute boy was not impressed.)
Okay, so you move to a paid provider. You're giving AWS some money so that you can host helloworld.html on their S3 service for a year. That's well and good, unless! You run out of money. Or the price goes up. Or you didn't set it up for auto-renewal, and you forget to pay again before the year ends. Or you did set up auto-renewal, but your credit card expired this year and you forgot to update it. (Okay, I'm being a little dramatic here; they'll send you reminder emails and have a grace period for renewal if you totally forget to pay, but I'm a total scatterbrain and thus have nearly hit the limit of similar grace periods many times.)
By the way, it's not like you just have to worry about paying AWS. If you want to have myawesomedomain.com, you have to pay for the domain name separately, and renew that every year, too. You'll probably want to buy a WhoisGuard for your domain, too, since letting every rando on the internet know that myawesomedomain.com's owner lives at 123 Pleasant Street may not be the best plan. And if you deal with any sensitive customer information—say, God help you, credit card numbers—then you need an SSL certificate, which also has to be renewed every so often. If you forget any of these, though, don't worry; you're in some good company.
Speaking of sensitive information, as soon as you move away from static content—that is, the moment you let users do anything to the website—the number of things that can go wrong skyrockets. Say you've installed a Wordpress blog, or a phpbb forum—turns out there are lots of mean people who want to hack your blog or forum and fill it up with piles of Viagra ads. (Why is it always Viagra ads? We just don't know.) And since so many people use Wordpress, there are many, many people who spend their time prying through the Wordpress source code, looking for security holes they can exploit. Sure, you can update your Wordpress blog's software, which will protect you from getting hacked, but how do you find out when those updates are released? Wordpress lets you know when you log in if there's an update available, so I sure hope you're logging into your blog every day. phpbb will send you an email. You've never changed your email address, right? (And, by the way, doing those updates can start getting confusing and complicated compared to just setting it up.)
By the way, all those security problems that Wordpress and phpbb have? The computer that your website lives on has these problems, too. Lots of them. Luckily, the people you're paying are supposed to be installing those updates. You do trust the folks you're paying, right?
Though, even if you really trust the guys you're paying, sometimes they'll get tripped up by catastrophic weather or FBI raids, so it's all kind of a wash in the end.
I guess the big lesson here is that, lots of folks imagine a web site is something like a painting. Someone paints it, you buy it, and then you invite all your friends over to admire how pretty it looks in your living room, and that's that. But it's more like building a house. Or rather, it's like building a house in some alternate universe where time is going by ten times as fast. All these people keep coming in and scuffing up the floor! There's too much junk in the attic! There was a huge flood and now some of the wood's starting to rot away! The kitchen sink is broken!
You can avoid worrying about a lot of these problems, by paying other people to take care of your house, but at the end of the day, someone is doing a lot of work to just keep your site running.
