Post #3970678

2026-07-20 15:22 UTC

@aredridel@kolektiva.social what i'm hearing is that the kind of security you need for people who don't trust each other to work together is expensive to provide at a small scale, that makes sense to me! I'm really curious about whether it would be possible to build a smallish shared web hosting service with Firecracker where everyone is totally isolated from each other. I experimented with firecracker a while back and I didn't get that far but it seemed maybe possible. but VMs are not that cheap to run

Replies (1)

@aredridel@kolektiva.social 2026-07-20 15:28

@b0rk@social.jvns.ca Yeah, though I don't think you need to go that aggressive in many cases. Containerization is pretty solid if not perfect. Non-root containerization like podman is a step again. Having a narrower interface like CGI or FastCGI is again a help. But some of it is that what we want in a platform _just barely_ crosses into what's hard to provide cheaply. Static hosting is _so easy_ in comparison, because it's just data. A trick that might be viable to revive is a relatively common if not standard set of available dynamic tools provided by the host. Users don't get to supply dynamic things but they do get to use the host's. Now that code generation is pretty trivial, the actual economics of that might have changed favorably. (I am always surprised how much LLMs change the economics in ways that enable some old-school things to work now. I'm unsure the net benefits and the whole calculus of it, but there's avenues worth understanding.) The big one however is backups. Modern cloud systems make this the user's problem. Old school hosting made it the admin's problem. Servers as 'cattle not pets' works great when you have a durable data store you back up and snapshot. When you're talking about a bunch of tiny data but that is valuable and should be backed up, things get weird. There's something to be said for the 'servers as pets' mentality there. The fundamental contract there is that Someone Has Your Back With The Data. That's something we've lost, and I think that's bad.

Open ##3970677