Re: AWS applications and domain hosting

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Jacob Sparre Andersen" <sparre@nbi.dk> wrote in message
news:m2mzpc20tu.fsf@hugin.crs4.it...
...
> The benefit of running through a proxy are:
>
>  a) You don't have to implement plain handing out of static files
>     yourself.

That's such a trivial task (assuming that AWS includes appropriate handling
of HTTP commands) that's it's pretty silly not to include it and avoid extra
failure points.

>  b) Your daemon doesn't have to run as "root" (which is the case, if
>     you want it to bind directly to port 80 on the system).

That must be one of the few advantages of Windows. :-) I run the AdaIC.com
server as a service under a heavily restricted user account (it does not
have permission to access most of the disk or other partitions or systems).
No special permissions changes needed.

While Apache is a fine program, if you're doing light-duty work (and almost
all web programs outside of Google are light-duty), an all-Ada solution will
perform adequately and will be much less likely to break. After all, I
believe in security by not having unused services on the system. Generalized
systems like Apache simply provide too many "features" of little value to be
safe. "Turning off" unused services via a configuration file is much less
safe (someone could rewrite the configuration file) than not having the
services around in the first place. And every additional program will
provide an additional failure point.

                        Randy.