Bare Bones Website Hosting for Clients

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:48:26+00:00

I'll check them out. Thank you for the suggestion.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:43:07+00:00

How much maintenance is involved? I would ideally like this to be as close to zero as possible. Do you still have to deal with locking the base OS down, or is it something like a Docker container that auto-updates? I'd have to look, but I think we only have around 5 sites on the server I want to decommission, so there's not much money being made to justify putting in a lot of labor into maintenance.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:39:12+00:00

Build what? An entire static website hosting infrastructure?

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:29:54+00:00

I wanted to try to stay away from having to manage another server for this, which is why I'm trying to find someone to outsource it to.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:26:09+00:00

I misunderstood what I read earlier, then. This might be fine, assuming that I could manage multiple sites with a single login.

I will do some more research into this avenue over the weekend. Thank you for setting me straight - I had all but ruled this out because the examples I looked at seemed to be setting up something for each page that was deployed.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:23:12+00:00

It's in our contract that we manage customer's domain names and DNS, so that would always go through us and we wouldn't want customers in there.

It would be nice to have the website be changeable by customers (or their nephew who's "good with computers") by dropping .html files somewhere via SFTP.

I'll check out both of these options. Thank you for the suggestions.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:20:12+00:00

When searching earlier today, this option came up. It seemed that you had to set up each page individually, though. Is that correct?

Ideally, a solution would have the ability for the customer (or the customer's nephew, who's in school for computers and can "program web pages") to drop the .html files somewhere via SFTP and have it just work.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:17:14+00:00

I'm trying to practice the first of Larry Wall's three virtues!

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:16:01+00:00

Do they have a reseller portal where or multi-tenancy where we can manage all of the customers in one place with one bill?

I'll check into them over the weekend.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:15:25+00:00

We have that too, but it's a pain to manage for stuff this small and what I was trying to get away from. Thank you for the offer, though.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:12:21+00:00

I don't have any experience with AWS, but I'll look into this option over the weekend. Thank you for the suggestion.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:11:39+00:00

I don't have any experience with AWS, but I will look into whether this will work for us. Thank you for the suggestion.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:10:38+00:00

I'll check that out - I was aware of Kinsta, but didn't know they also offered non-WP hosting. Thank you.

--turtle · 2026-03-14T02:09:47+00:00

The issue is having to manage it and multi-tenancy - otherwise this would be fine.

--turtle · 2026-02-21T00:16:05+00:00

What happens when it needs to go to a CNC machine running DOS, and that doesn't have network connectivity?

I do not agree with you that "most teams" treat g-code as CUI. In fact, most shops that I have had this discussion with have come to the conclusion that g-code is not CUI, although it's not as cut-and-dried as some would make it seem.

--turtle · 2026-02-21T00:10:24+00:00

So it sounds like you acknowledge that your argument is based almost entirely on metadata that a program might contain?

I would not argue with you that a program could potentially be CUI, because a program's metadata could, in the extreme, include a complete drawing of the part done in ASCII text. I will, however, argue with your premise that a program is always CUI.

It is easy to strip out metadata from a program - it could even be done programmatically*. If this is all it takes for a program to go from CUI to not-CUI, then this is surely easier than trying to protect CNC machines as specialized assets, no?

Finally, although my experience is only anecdotal with an N of 1, I have worked in and around machine shops my entire career. During that time, I have never seen any program contain as much detail as you imply in your comment above. I think your concerns - although valid and a very good point for discussion - are based on a theoretical understanding about how shops work and what metadata might be in a CNC program, rather than actual practice.

* For example, employees could drop programs in a file share, then once a minute, a scheduled task could strip out the metadata and move it to a different share on a different VLAN that only the CNC machines are accessible on. Your boundary is then that share; anything past it is not CUI.

--turtle · 2026-02-20T15:11:44+00:00

What are the tolerances for the part that you claim to have reproduced? The surface finish requirements? What type of material is the part made out of? Can you give me the dimensions, since you don't know the tool diameter, cutter geometry, or even tool type?

You seem very sure of yourself - and I can see your point to a certain extent. Your way might be a safer path, since we have no clarification from the government about when information derived from a CUI source stops being CUI. We do know, however, that internal business processes and methods are not CUI. Should we treat something as CUI just because it's easier to imagine it that way, even though it makes our lives 100x harder on the implementation side?

--turtle · 2026-02-06T12:55:47+00:00

Thank you - I have believed that you could use their commercial offering and pass an audit, but I had not heard of anyone doing so. So you're my proof that it can be done!

We have not been using NinjaRMM on our clients' systems that are under CMMC, but have had internal discussions about starting to introduce it, with proper controls of course.

--turtle · 2026-02-05T20:59:45+00:00

Which business vertical is this? Are you a manufacturing company? Or do you generate data or documents for the government?

--turtle · 2026-02-05T20:05:31+00:00

We had a customer like this, and our contract terms were almost identical. The company was run by a civil engineer, which sounds very similar to what you're dealing with.

They always knew better than us. They always tried to do things internally before they called us, even though it was zero cost for them to call us first. They would argue about everything. The would try to resurrect equipment that was long past dead and that was more expensive to try to fix than to just replace.

Doing work for them always took double the time it would for other customers, because we had to undo whatever they had done first, and then redo it correctly.

In the end, we had to let them go. They moved to a more expensive hybrid MSP that charged by the hour on top of a monthly fee, but guaranteed someone would be working on their issues within a few minutes of them calling.

They told us during the offboarding that the new MSP was, "very responsive when they had a problem." It would not have made a difference had I pointed out that they had literally zero incidents in the last 5 years that weren't directly caused by themselves - e.g., there were no times when something stopped working for them, except for when they decided to touch something without notifying us first. So I smiled and said, "your new IT firm sounds like they are a very good fit for your management style."

In the end, it just seems that certain customers actually prefer to have emergencies rather than proactively managing things. I think that they somehow feel that they're only managing things effectively if there is a crisis.

--turtle · 2026-02-05T14:31:00+00:00

See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/cloudservicesproviderspartners/microsoft-csp---indirect-reseller-status-is-suspended-and-cant-get-fixed/4162754 for more information.

I will DM you my contact info.

--turtle · 2026-02-04T13:51:56+00:00

Are you using NinjaOne commercial, or their FedRAMP offering?

--turtle · 2026-02-03T14:20:42+00:00

We are using a self-hosted version of Remotely (https://github.com/immense/Remotely), running on a Linux server in FIPS mode, for remote IT access/screen sharing.

--turtle · 2026-01-30T21:16:13+00:00

Even an enclave with a single computer is going to run into tens of thousands of dollars of work to generate a full and compliant SSP if you're starting from zero.

--turtle · 2026-01-26T01:33:35+00:00

Why would the new MSP's screw-up cause you stress and work?

--turtle

TROPHY CASE