livingpunchbag

Experienced C programmer here. I need to build a very simple website for personal usage with:

- Password-protected login to hide every single page behind

- A single sqlite database with possibly a single table (maybe a second single-line table to store my login + pw-hash + salt)

- A single page to upload stuff to the database. Some kind of asynchronous JS instead of HTML forms may be preferred.

- A single page that always shows the same database query

- Very infrequent access to the site (not more than once per day)

- There's basically zero chance that this would grow to something bigger. Maybe just extend the site functionality to allow my wife to also use it, and maybe find a way to interact with it from command line on Linux (but probably by doing HTTPS requests).

I did something like this with PHP back in 2007, but I know PHP is not very recommended. I worry that trying to learn a whole framework like Ruby on Rails or Django may be overkill. I really like Ruby as a programming language (although I never used RoR), so sticking with it would be cool, but Dreamhost says I should avoid it since it uses use too much memory and I'm on a shared plan. I also have some experience with cgi-bin in python, but I'm also told cgi-bin should be avoided just like PHP. I'm also aware that I could use some sort of server-side javascript, but there are a trillion frameworks to choose from.

What would you use today? What would you recommend?

Hello

I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.

I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me.

I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.

What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?

Thanks a lot.