You are launching a new SaaS company – what PaaS solution would you use? | Hacker News Reader

You are launching a new SaaS company – what PaaS solution would you use?

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You are launching a new SaaS company - what PaaS solution would you use? If not PaaS, what would you use (guessing IaaS - AWS or GCE Kube)?

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Depend how much VC funding/ hosting credit obtained [1][2], if bootstrapped and selfunded (money matter) then bare metal [3][4][5].

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/bizs...

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/

[3] https://www.soyoustart.com/en/

[4] https://www.hetzner.de/

[5] any other provider (softlayer,packet,...)

So you wouldn't use a Heroku or cloudfoundry etc? You'd go for IaaS. Why?

Or maybe even Kubernetes?

Oh sure! That also depend on project, skills, work load, system design, goals, SLA. And many project specific 'things'. Few more links attached. IAAS, bare metal means different price point.

[0] http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/ (Heroku self-hosted)

[1] http://rancher.com/ ('Point and click Docker cluster ')

[2] https://www.mindmeister.com/389671722/open-container-ecosyst...

[3] https://www.ansible.com/ (Server provision)

Because you can get so much free hosting credit, especially if you're in an accelerator in the Global Accelerator Network. I'm not sure the numbers published on their site are complete or tell the whole story. I've personally seen startups get 5 and 6 figures worth of AWS credit with up to 2 years to use.

Also, using AWS doesn't necessarily imply IaaS. You can use Elastic Beanstalk.

on [4] why not ovh ? They provide more features (load balancer,s3-clone) and still cheap.

Just start with a VM or dedicated server until you have scale that matters. Focus on product.

If you want an early head start with something like containers, then Kubernetes is nice and 1.4 has some good features to make it easy to scale across clouds/on-prem/colo in the future.

Personally I'd make sure the various services were at least deployable as Docker containers. That way there's a lot of flexibility in switching providers, and makes it easier to deploy on prem later if/when you need to.

As for which platform? IMO the most important factor is which platforms the developer(s) are most comfortable/familiar with. The last thing a new SaaS startup needs is to waste time while the engineers figure out a new platform they've never used... Doesn't really matter how easy or cheap it is to deploy if there's no product ready to deploy ;)

Currently debating between OVH, Online.net, and Hetzner.

Hetzner is cheapest but the other two have private networking.

If I didn't care about cost I would just use AWS or Google.

I would use PaaS like:

Cloudways/Heroku because I don't want to spend my time on bothering with server management.

I'd use AWS Lambda

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