Ask HN: Which cloud is good in support and value for money for small websites? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which cloud is good in support and value for money for small websites?

38 pointshitr26 comments

I have mainly used Azure cloud for many of the smaller applications I run and been quite satisfied with it.My applications are on .net and I am quite familiar with Microsoft stack and was previously working with Microsoft :).I am currently in the process of building my new app in .net core+postgres and am open to Google cloud platform or AWS or any other cloud provider if it is offers better value for money stability and support.I am not really worried about the features provided by each of these providers as I always try to build things cloud agnostic and try to not use any provider specific features.I am only interested in the part where value for money for small/medium(e.g 10 K users,100 K pageviews) web apps is good,stability and very good customer support. Has anyone here used Google's or AWS or switched providers and got any experience/suggestions to share?

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There are plenty of choices... in addition to the ones mentioned below, you might want to just rent a low-end dedicated server, where the hardware is guaranteed to be repaired if defective (make good offsite backups). Performance will be higher in most cases (dedicated CPU and high RAM).

e.g. https://www.wholesaleinternet.net/dedicated/ (blue order buttons are in stock)

Intel i3 chip with 8GB RAM and 500GB disk - $20/month .

Thanks for sharing. This is insanely cheap. It can be used for test\dev at least if not prod env.

Thanks for sharing this one.This is very cheap. How do we guarantee high availability/fail over on this one in case we need it ? I am guessing we have to make sure multiple servers like this should be bought and implement our own fail over.Also what is your experience with tech support ?

You tell them what distribution you want of Linux installed, they install it, and then you manage the server on your own.

Install the needed SMART utilities to keep an eye on your disks. I think if you can show them a SMART failure that means the drive will fail soon, they will replace it for you.

Their tech support is competent but is mostly limited to the basics of installing and initial configuration of network, plus taking care of the hardware.

I use+like vultr: it's like a better digital ocean. I can often fit more than one service onto a single $5 node.

(referral link: http://www.vultr.com/?ref=6993536-3B, should give you $20 of credit)

Besides the extra memory on the $5 node, what makes Vultr better than DO?

More data centre choices, storage nodes with spinning rust backed disks with lots of space are two. The support is not even close though.

out of my limited benchmarking, i get faster network and disk speeds on vultr than DO. this might just be an anomaly because my tests are far from thorough, but i think worthy of mention still

  - CPU seems to be a bit faster than DO
  - More data centres (notably for me: one in Australia (sydney))
  - Allow using any operating system/distro you want (just upload the ISO)
  - Free snapshots (for now...)

Otherwise I get a much better 'vibe' out of them: they've been helpful when I request slightly odd things, have been fast to respond to security issues, etc.

Hmm, I had a closer look, and most of my instances are old 3.4GHz ones rather than the currently deployable 2.4GHz ones. See https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/567/no-more-3-4-ghz-cpu...

Though looking at https://joshtronic.com/2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linod... the current ones still aren't that bad.

Windows is offered. Don't think DO provides that unless you use your own ISO.

Relevant read ~> https://joshtronic.com/2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linod...

Cloud pricing is relatively similar. If you are not bound to any cloud it means you are not really using anything specific. You could then check Amazon lightsail or Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, etc.

We started with DO as a way to prototype quickly and ended up running a large scale telecom service on it. Doesn't get you much "in the box", but you have no lock-in either; works well enough and it's nice to use.

I've had good luck over the years with Server Axis. For much cheaper, Scaleway has some innovative "bare metal" offerings. 3 euros/month, it'll even fit Apache and Wordpress. Some of my heavier PHP lifting had to move something with a little more horsepower, though.

I'm new to deploying applications on a Cloud. Could you guys give some examples to 'not cloud agnostic applications'?

Many cloud providers offer A service unavailable elsewhere. Examples include AWS lambda and Google Bigquery. If you built software using one of these services, you couldn't just pick up your code and deploy it elsewhere without major code modifications.

For comparison, let's say you're on AWS and only use cloud agnostic dependencies--Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and so on. You might have to change config variables, but you could otherwise move your application over to GCP quickly.

I understand now. Thanks Eric.

Well you can try using an Azure App Service in shared mode which is very cheap.

Has anyone tried scaleway?

No, but their pricing looks impressive enough to try.

And impressive enough that it leaves me wondering what corners are probably being cut.

They use ARM chips.

The other thread said they have Intel too.

Cool to know. Thanks for the correction.

prgmr.com

5 GiB RAM, 60 GiB Disk is $20/mo

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