Thanks. Site redundancy is not about reducing downtime. Our installers host, SourceForge, takes care of mirrors on its own. The point is to not have all mirrors under the control of a single entity. If something were to happen to SourceForge and I were not around to move installers elsewhere, there is a chance the project would potentially disappear. Having a second third party site, in our case GitHub, act as a mirror prevents that from happening.
I avoid handling the hosting of installers myself because of the complexities it entails. Certain web crawlers will incorrectly blacklist entire websites as dangerous under the pretext of āpotentially hosting malwareā for simply linking directly to an executable. Due to that, most sites wonāt let you download installers directly and instead will take you to a page where some JavaScript will automatically run and download the file for you after a few seconds. If the JavaScript wonāt auto run, you will be given a link to a page with some other form of logic that will re-direct you to the download. The address from where the download actually comes from will be different from that of the link that you clicked. That helps protect the site from getting blacklisted. I didnāt want to go through the trouble of developing all that, so I instead used 3rd party hosts. It is not uncommon for open source projects to do the same. Some go as far as referring to these same 3rd party hosts as mirrors.
Our issue isnāt having excess redundancy, itās not organizing things well enough for an untrained audience to navigate. GitHub (our mirror) is designed with software developers in mind and asumes people will know the right file to download just by looking at the file extension. QPromptās audience are not software developers. This conversation is proof that I made a poor choice by choosing GitHub Releases to host QPromptās installers (due to its lack of organization) and a poorer decision by pointing regular users towards it. In any case, as I stated a few days ago, Iāve filed a ticket to work on this. It can be found here:
I should also clarify that what you call site two and four are two pages of the same website. Technicalities aside, your point still stands, less pages could be better for users. However, there are some things I cannot simplify without sacrificing redundancy or undertaking additional work. Because of that I will continue to use SourceForge to host downloads and GitHub will continue to serve as our version control platform. Everything else is up for improvements.
Sorry, Good Buddy, but someone has been not telling you the truth and you should not believe them. Site mirroring is all about redundancy. When one server gets overloaded or goes down, the other server picks up the load.
If you do not trust you service provider to maintain 5-nines, then find someone else. (Anyone, including you, can provide that on your own.) I would never pay for another host provider when I already am paying one. That would be an unnecessary waste of money.
Any reputable VPS is going to keep your site up, running and unlikely to be blacklisted unless you do something stupid with your content.
With all that said, I visited the link you gave for the issue posted. Just who were you expecting to address that issue? You posted it at your own site!
@KitchM You have misunderstood me and are missing the point. What I meant to say is Iām not doing site redundancy to reduce downtime, Iām doing it so the project is hosted in more than one place in the event that something were to happen to me and to one of the sites.
Perhaps. In any case, I speak from personal experience having been next to someone who got their site blacklisted for self-hosting a safe Windows executable on a VPN they administered.
I posted it on the projectās issue tracker. Thatās where we keep track of feature requests and bugs, and now website issues, so they can be addressed.
Thanks for your views. However, your concern for something happening to you might be best handled by setting up a fall-back management team. On the other hand, the worry that something might happen to one of the sites is still misplaced, IMHO.
This comment appears quite anecdotal. My experience would indicate this to be highly unlikely and nowhere near a norm.
But it sounds like you will have to be the one to address is since it is your site, or are we missing something. What are you not telling us?
QPrompt is a small community project. I started it and do most of the work.
That is an unlikely thing to happen, yes; but my time is scarce so I wonāt be taking any chances on that.
Iām not the only person with access to the site. However, I will likely be the one to address this.
If what youāre trying to point out is that I havenāt assigned myself as the person who will address this itās because small issues like this are good to leave unassigned in case somebody else wants to tackle them. That said, my plan is to address this while updating the site for the next release, which is overdue by a month. You can read more about that in the development blog.
I would point out that you are still paying too much by having two VPS providers.
Also, if you wish others to help, when it comes to web site design, I am not sure how you could get help if others are not on your team with access to the site administration. It sounds as though you are unnecessarily burdening yourself with too much work, IMHO.
As I always tell others, I am interested in what I can do to help the FOSS community but it requires a point of connection. I donāt know what I can do otherwise.
The extra cost is mostly in the form of time consumed. If you add the monetary cost alone, itās actually cheaper the way itās done currently. But I will unify them both later under DigitalOcean and move away from Akamai. DO servers are generally faster and Iāve already pre-paid for years of hosting there.
When I started QPrompt I did it as a solo project with little intention of opening it up for collaboration at the time. That has changed since and Iāve put a lot of effort in making various things (translations, documentation, development) accessible for others to contribute. However, the website isnāt one of those things, as it is something that requires a high degree of trust for people to work on.
It doesnāt have to be that way tho, the code could be hosted on GitHub and there could be CI for the server to be updated automatically. Trust would be managed via the triaging process. However, that would require a website re-design, because the current site is made using a proprietary tool and manipulating already minimized code isnāt a good thing to be doing. If I were to re-do it, I would use either Hugo or Django to make it.
Let me know if youād like to contribute your skills to any of these things, and also what skills do you have. Iām currently focused on QPromptās build pipeline issues, so it would likely be a long time before I get to those things if it were left up to me.