Deploystack – Curated list of best tools for launching your website | Hacker News Reader

Deploystack – Curated list of best tools for launching your website

deploystack.io

279 pointsVhaeraun90 comments

Hey everyone,

I have created this website after struggling with deploying my website for the first time (which one of the 1000+ hosting companies to chose? How to get a cheap domain? Analytics, monitoring, what other tools I need?) and I thought it might be useful for others. There are no advertisements and it was not sponsored by any company, I did a lot of reading, checked different services and picked up those that offer the best value for money and are recommended by other developers. I tried to add coupon codes where applicable. I have submitted DeployStack few months ago and got some good feedback, so I added a bunch of new tools and redesigned it to be more clear. Let me know if you think it's interesting and useful.

Pretty cool website!! I've launched lots of sites so I'm familiar with most of these tools. But was still able to learn a few things from this.

Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback! And it's great to hear that it's useful not only to the beginners.

I think the site looks great and will be very informative for people with a wide range of experience. As a person with something deployed to literally every provider you've listed (and using most of the ancillary tools as well) I'd say you've done a pretty accurate job describing them.

EDIT: One enhancement I might suggest is that another way of listing hosting, instead of by $/hr or $/mo might be to suggest an instance size with estimated cost based on project type. IE: Wordpress (or generic) CMS hosting, Static website, Bitcoin Mining, etc. For the truly novice they may take the suggestions at the $20/mo price point because that seems affordable but in reality they could be running at free or $5.

You could probably cascade it all the way down. For a static homepage you may just suggest a Free AWS instance, Monitoring, and Version control. For CMS you may suggest the whole stack, etc.

That's a really nice idea, I like it (and I see other people suggesting something similar). I might add a separate page with some recommendations for specific projects (as you say, like a Wordpress stack, static website, etc.)

If you are going to list notes for static sites, definitely consider Google Firebase and Netlify. Both have free and paid options that give you a ton of mileage.

> There are no advertisements

But some of the links are affiliate links. I don't have a problem with this, but if you're going to make a big deal about not having ads or sponsorship, then I think you should have mentioned this too.

And do the gentleman's thing of indicating affiliate links by appending a * or other symbol.

Transparency is good, even if the laws in your part of the world don't require it.

I think it's good enough that they recommended a number of options without an affiliate program. Intentions pass my bar of nobleness.

In the FAQ it does clearly mention that affiliate links are used.

I personally, don't have any issues with affiliate links so long as it takes me where I expected to go without a bunch of redirects through various trackers. Basically if I can follow it w/ an ad blocker on we're okay in my book.

I think him picking up affiliate links and not polluting site with ads is good balance. It doesn't change anything for you as a visitor.

There is nothing wrong with making money, it is wrong when I get video playing when I click on a link at HN.

Thank you, finally someone with a bit of compassion, instead of hate because "there are affiliation links on the website, so he was obviously paid". That was exactly my idea: no ads, because ads sucks and if a service has an affiliation link, why not use it? For some websites like DigitalOcean, actually using the affiliation link gives you free credits when you register, while without the affiliation link, you don't get anything. I thought that mentioning the affiliation links in the main section of the FAQ page would be enough, but maybe that's not enough. That's something I should fix soon.

I have added information on top of the main page about the affiliation links, I hope that will be clear enough for most people :)

Hi Vhaeraun

This is refreshing, congrats! How do you go about evaluating new tools and/or platforms? I built Cachoid ( https://www.cachoid.com/ ), which is a site-speed as a service platform (Varnish + WAF + scalability) and I'm curious to see if you're interested in this kind of vertical. Would love to chat about this joe@ aforementioned site.

Thanks

I feel like Sentry[0] should be on the error tracking list, it's an amazing product that's fully open source so you can host it yourself if you're concerned about privacy or throw some money at the stellar team behind it to have them host it for you!

[0]: https://sentry.io

Thanks for the advice, I didn't know about Sentry. I will definitely check it out!

Yes, I was surprised it's not the first on that list. Amazing product and amazing people behind it!

Somewhat unrelated, I have seen a lot of places list a "con" of Sentry that its only free plan (non-trial) is self-hosted. This is a pro for me! I LOVE that I can run Sentry on my own infrastructure :)

Strange, we definitely have a free tier (and have had one for years). Our current free plan includes 10k events a month.

But yes, hosting it yourself is the ultimate free tier.

Obvious disclaimer, I work at Sentry.

Awesome! I clearly read something misinformed; there is totally a free plan. Makes you guys even more great

Does sentry collect logs or is it just for crash reports? What is a good log collector (preferably self-hosted)?

Sentry captures exception logs only and from within the application. You could probably use it to do any kind of event-based tracking but its quotas are pretty clearly intended for significant failure events that you would normally dump into the error log. (i.e. Fatal Errors as well as anything in a try/catch block)

An open source broad based log collecting/processing stack would be more like:

https://www.elastic.co/webinars/introduction-elk-stack

Fairly disappointing list. No GC in hosting list, even with generous free tier on App Engine, Firebase and other services. No DigitalOcean. No Azure. On e-mail front, no SendGrid and Mailgun, even with their generous free tiers. No Cloudflare. CI as category is ignored. 1&1 makes it, but GoDaddy, Gandi, and others don't.

You read too fast: Digital Ocean, Mailgun and CloudFlare are mentioned (you just need to click on the tabs to make them appear).

But I agree that App Engine and Gandi could have their place in this list.

> 1&1 makes it, but GoDaddy, Gandi, and others don't.

Godaddy? They use shady tactics to mislead customers, their service is pretty bad and they are an overall unethical company. I would never recommend them.

Hosting was the most tricky part to describe - first of all, because there are so many companies and I wanted to keep the list short (otherwise it's not helpful). The second reason is that everyone has different opinions on the hosting companies - for example, one person can have a great experience with Godaddy and someone else will have a very bad one. So I decided to go for the DigitalOcean and Linode as they have a rather good reputation among developers and AWS, as they are popular among many developers (+ they come with a huge amount of other services that you can use). Plus Heroku with their free plan.

If you're going to mention AWS, you should also be mentioning GCE and Azure, as each can be the cheapest/best under certain circumstances. It'd be even better if you analyzed their offerings to give people an idea of when to choose each offering. I'd also like to see at least one static site hosting company (Netlify?) listed since they can be a lot cheaper than the big cloud companies if that's all you need.

In general, I didn't find this list particularly useful. There wasn't a single product on your list that I'm not intimately familiar with, and I'm not the sort of person that really keeps an ear close to the ground on these sort of things. The categories of SaaS products you recommend are pretty limited. It could be useful if you indexed more providers in more categories and then asked some basic questions to cull the list down to a personalized recommendation for your reader's needs. But short of that, there's little here that you wouldn't get from five minutes on StackShare.

I completely agree with you - if you know all of the services that are mentioned here, you are probably well more experienced developer ("deployer"?) than me or other people that are the main audience for DeployStack. As for AWS, I mostly mention their LightSail plan, which is quite simple and straightforward (as in the case of Linode and DigitalOcean). GCE and Azure are definitely great tools and I see many people complaining about the lack of them on the website, but they are way more advanced than the scope of the DeployStack, at least for now. Thanks for the feedback, I will keep that in mind and try to add some more advanced sections in the future!

I personally recommend Google Domains for $12/year per domain. Nice UI with two-factor authentication, private WHOIS, and multiple users can manage the domain.

The last time I talked to 1&1 support on the phone, they made me read my password out loud so they could manage my account. I can never recommend that company for anything crucial to running a business.

I really like RedHat's Paas, Openshift.

Be very careful using a "free" tier on any email service if you care about reliable delivery. These are naturally utilized by people sending spam, so the mail servers used by the free tier plans tend to get a low(er) reputation. I had this issue with Mailgun, which otherwise is a fantastic service.

Just curious so can you explain what was the issue you faced using the Mailgun free plan? I have used their free plan in the past and never faced issues with reliable delivery and the emails were never marked as spam.

This was about 8 months ago -- had never used Mailgun before. I was seeing nearly 30% "dropped" messages (rejected by receiver due to sender reputation). They did move me to another IP which worked much better, but the first impression on users was already made. I didn't push it too much because after all I wasn't paying for it so didn't really have much standing to complain.

Did you warm up your mailing list? I've seen an issue before, but it was down to our domain being new for email and us not knowing to gradually ramp up the emails instead of sending many from the get go.

Mailgun has a whole FAQ type thing about sharing IPs vs getting dedicated. They kind of claim an opposite/divergent thing from what you write. They say using shared as you build domain reputation can help because you pool with more established senders. Did you find that not to be true? Are there many spammers in that pool? Should I just go dedicated right away?

I find that mailgun is highly protective over thier IP reputation, so unless you actually run into an issue yourself, don't bother with dedicated. Some spammers may use them but I've not seen much evidence of it.

Pretty cool website. It is properly credited at the bottom of the page, but I think it deserves an explicit mention.

Creative-tim, material-kit theme [1]

[1] http://demos.creative-tim.com/material-kit/index.html

I just deployed a corporate site last week using Jekyll, hosted on S3 with CloudFront using a free AWS certificate. Content management is provided by forestry.io which has been mentioned a couple times on HN and is a compelling alternative for the CMS functionality and a necessity for the client. When I think Website, this is the best 'stack' I've deployed with.

This is pretty slick with useful information presented in easy-to-compare form. The hardest part is going to be keeping the info up to date.

As others have mentioned, some pretty big-name offerings are missing despite being surprisingly capable. I use Google App Engine's free tier for some hobbyist-level hosting because it gives me full control over the incoming and outgoing HTTP request in an autoscaling PaaS, which is very convenient, but it also cuts off with 503s if my quota is exceeded and I won't get a nasty bill at the end of the month for stuff I can live without.

A little while ago I made an Ask HN [1] that didn't get much traction where I described all the desirable features I wanted, to seek an alternative for Google App Engine. Is there a comparable Paas/FaaS that has a free or cheap tier, and a no-cost quota cutoff?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13504712

Not really. AppEngine is unique in this way. It has a combination of features and constraints that make it very difficult to replicate what it can do elsewhere. GAE is a product not just a collection of APIs.

The closest thing to AppEngine out there is ElasticBeanstalk and Heroku, which resemble each other far more than they resemble AppEngine. Good luck.

AppEngine doesn't support php7. Call me old fashioned but that's a show stopper for me.

You are, indeed, old fashioned. But GAE has a Java SDK, so you can run PHP on GAE after all.

https://github.com/collegeman/php-in-java

This looks awesome and quite helpful for first deploys.

However after deploying bunch of projects and knowing which services to use we found it is still pain to set up everything together. We thought that automating this process might be valuable and would reduce barrier on starting new projects.

So we put together service where for $39 one time payment we would do the following for you: (assuming you own a domain name - we will need to ask you to point dns of your domain name to cloudflare)

All the following services will be set up with free tier, so you won't need to pay anything to run your project unless you will want to upgrade anything:

- set up CloudFlare account to manage your DNS - get email for you domain with Zoho and make sure that deliverability settings adjusted correctly - set up web site on zoho with blog - create Google account and register the website with Google Webmaster and Google Analytics - register with Mixpanel for extra event analytics - add inspectlet to capture videos of what visitors doing on your website - create Stripe account to accept payments - hook up web chat from Zoho to chat with your visitors - create facebook and twitter accounts

As a deliverable we will send you a password file that you can open with password safe application (free) and instructions on how to change your passwords. We will also send overview of all accounts and customization steps.

As a pro (or coder) version of our service we will add setting up Azure, AWS or Heroku account, source control account, deploying skeleton application to the cloud (ruby, python, node.js or asp.net). The application will contain user sign up feature, integration with analytics, logging, transactional email, error reporting services.

We were planning to launch our website next weekend but I couldn't resist this discussion. If you are interested, send us email at info@zenprojectstarter.com or leave us a comment on our blank website http://www.zenprojectstarter.com

It's impressive that only a quarter of the links are affiliate links.

Could someone explain the hate for affiliate links? Maybe I'm just being naive, but as long as there's no suspicion of ratings bias, I'm fine with them.

Ex: I've used thewirecutter.com recommendations for home supplies--and I'm happy to give the creators a kickback for their effort (at no cost to me).

Judging by the rest of the comments in this discussion, there are some very notable oversights missing from this list. It's not unlikely that is caused by a lack of referral program from those providers.

There may be notable services missing, but I wouldn't say it is an oversight. It seems the most popular or well-known services are covered and not all of them have referral links. Sure, there is room for improvement, but it seems to me that the creator put this together in good faith.

> Could someone explain the hate for affiliate links? Maybe I'm just being naive, but as long as there's no suspicion of ratings bias, I'm fine with them.

> Ex: I've used thewirecutter.com recommendations for home supplies--and I'm happy to give the creators a kickback for their effort (at no cost to me).

Wirecutter is an example of affiliate links working well. The site itself adds value by providing deep reviews of each product set and presents options, even at different price points.

The vast majority of sites that include affiliate links are nothing more than listicles with the bare min amount of content to get included in search engine indexes.

They're also notorious for not being maintained so whatever the "best, more curated, bespoke, ..." content was of 201X becomes the only recommendation ever presented.

They're looked down upon becayse they're associated with questionable "review" sites that are essentially grey-hat SEO-gaming schemes.

I don't think this site qualifies though. There's nothing wrong with affiliate-linking an unbiased head-to-head comparison.

It misaligns incentives. This comment thread is full of people pointing out popular services that haven't been included. The reason they haven't been included is because they don't have affiliate programs.

I don't know how this can be presented as 'a curated list of best tools' when it simply isn't

This isn't unbiased content, it's an advertorial - a blatant one, at that - and for that reason it doesn't really belong here.

When there is money involved you have to question if the difference in revenue is biasing the review, or the choice of products to consider in the review.

The other 3/4 websites don't have the affiliation programs ;) But jokes aside, as I tried to explain on the FAQ website, I'm not related with any of the companies and tried to choose them honestly, based on the quality of the service they offer. If they have affiliation links, I have add them. If not, it doesn't matter. There are many great services like Amazon, Heroku or all of the errors tracking tools, that don't have affiliation links and they are there because their service is great, so I'm not trying to trick people to use the other tools because that will give me money (also, none of the affiliation links give you real money, usually those are some credits on each platform, and if, for example an affiliation link can help me host the this website for free for couple of months, then why not).

> The other 3/4 websites don't have the affiliation programs ;)

My comment was half meant as a jest at exactly that. If they existed, I'm sure they'd be included as well.

> But jokes aside, as I tried to explain on the FAQ website, I'm not related with any of the companies and tried to choose them honestly, based on the quality of the service they offer. If they have affiliation links, I have add them. If not, it doesn't matter. There are many great services like Amazon, Heroku or all of the errors tracking tools, that don't have affiliation links and they are there because their service is great, so I'm not trying to trick people to use the other tools because that will give me money [truncated ...]

Oh come on. We all know you created the site specifically to plant affiliate links. There's no shame in admitting it.

> [... truncated] (also, none of the affiliation links give you real money, usually those are some credits on each platform, and if, for example an affiliation link can help me host the this website for free for couple of months, then why not).

You can host this website for free, permanently, as a static site on GitHub pages.

Saying you can use the money to pay for hosting the site "free for couple of months" shows you know even less about what's available than I already thought.

The whole google cloud platform doesn't get enough cred. Would be nice to add it to the list.

+1 You can run a fairly decent amount of traffic on free-tier App Engine

I agree, but it really misses a free tier for the SQL database (similar to Heroku Postgres limited to 10k rows for example).

Azure is also missing

I did take a look at Azure, but it looks complicated. Probably for someone who has more experience and actually have used it, it's not, but I couldn't easily find how I can get a simple VM, and when I used the calculator for the VM, the price was almost two times more expensive comparing to DigitalOcean or Linode. I see that there are many people using Azure and probably it's a great ecosystem, but I wanted to focus on easier to use tools, that will be more friendly to beginner web developers. I might think of a section for more advanced options (not a single hosting, but a whole service that includes multiple tools) where Azure would be a great fit.

For an application you may not even need their VMs, an AppService instance may be enough and potentially cost less. BTW, you can find them on the "New" menu on the left

Unclear why GC and Azure, both with amazing offerings, are not listed.

GC and Azure are great tools and I see many people complaining about the lack of them on DeployStack, but they are quite advanced options comparing to other services, so they don't really fit well in, let's say the 'Hosting' category (they have much more tools than just hosting, they could replace your whole tech stack). And I wanted DeployStack to be used as "choose your own tech stack" - if you need only hosting, those are the companies that are good and cheap with just hosting. If you already have a website but need to get some statistics - here are tools for uptime monitoring and here are some for analytics. Anyway, thanks for mentioning GC and Azure, I will keep that in mind and try to add some more advanced sections in the future, where they would fit perfectly.

Nice job and a useful website. One nitpick: there were free ssl certificates before Let's Encrypt, but not nearly as easy to use.

For my SaaS (pre-launch) I chose to go full AWS (BeanStalk, RDS, S3, CF, Route53, ACM, SES) + GitLab (4 private repos: front, back, deployment scripts, website).

Total costs: $24 (2 domain names)

I still need some monitoring and logging tools but I'm sure there are free solutions for my needs.

As far as email sending is concerned, Mailgun seems better, with 10k emails per month free, no?

Sparkpost offers 100k on their free account

That's very interesting! I figured I could save some money from switching Spamnesty (http://spa.mnesty.com/) to Sparkpost, but they don't seem to support receiving email?

I love mailgun for projects

Yup, Mailgun is great and I added it in the "Transactional emails" section (you just need to click the blue bar in the emails section).

I would add a image/video hosting & management category - there are some well established players in the market that have nice free tiers (full disclosure: I work at one). Makes life simpler than working with Storage & CDNs.

Can you recommend some of them? I've tried using Dropbox for very low-traffic personal sites before but the workflow was less than ideal.

Really, no Azure? They have great linux support (if that is your thing).

Feel free to add https://www.aerobatic.com to your list for static hosting.

disclaimer: I work there.

Missing: http://surge.sh/, also might be worth noting you can host a static site for free on GitHub.

Thanks, I didn't know about the surge, I will check it out for the next update (also static pages on GitHub is a great tool, I forgot to mention them).

This could be the "first to go" website for beginners when launching a new project :). However it misses some services such as Azure, CloudFare etc.

Thanks for the feedback. CloudFlare (which is a great service) is under the "Monthly Plans" for the CDN :) Azure and GCE are great tools and I see many people complaining about the lack of them on DeployStack, but they are quite advanced options comparing to other services, so they don't really fit well in, let's say the 'Hosting' category (they have much more tools than just hosting, they could replace your whole tech stack). And I wanted DeployStack to be used as "choose your own tech stack" - if you need only hosting, those are the companies that are good and cheap with just hosting. If you already have a website but need to get some statistics - here are tools for uptime monitoring and here are some for analytics. I will try to find a place for them in the next update to the website (maybe in a more advanced section).

Great list. Would like to see some self-hosted options here and not SaaS. Can I recommend cloudron.io? Just run it off a Digital Ocean or Linode server and you get all apps in https://cloudron.io/store/index.html (Mattermost, Nextcloud, Gitlab, Mailtrain, Ghost to name a few). Obviously, you still need a CDN and Domain but Lets Encrypt integration is built-in.

Does self-hosting make sense for startups/products that are launching? Curious to know if there are start ups out there who value self-hosting from the get go.

Hey, thanks for the feedback. Self-hosting is a more advanced area (I would imagine large companies deciding to self-host, mainly for the privacy reasons, but not single developers), so it's out of the scope of DeployStack for now (I'm trying to focus on tools that would be more useful to single developers, start-ups). However, it could be a nice section for a page covering more advanced topics, so I will take a note of it for the future. Thanks!

I understand: It's curated and opinionated and there should only be three big players on the list. I strongly feel that hosting is not a commodity. There are big differences between PaaS and VPS hosting in service level.

Shameless plug: We run [PHP as a Service](https://www.fortrabbit.com) which is a managed stack with pre-installed Git push to deploy, Composer and Let's Encrypt certs for all domains.

Visual studio team services is with looking at. Includes git, release management and continuous integration with a free tire

Design is nice, content is shamefully incomplete. Best case is honest bias, worst case is author has been compensated.

Of course he is compensated... there are affiliate links all over the place.

Not that I think that is inherently bad, but you must be careful of bias and understand lots of good options may not be presented.

What about a static site served by an object store through a CDN? I just did a pure S3/Cloudfront project.

I would assume Firebase, Azure, Digital Ocean, etc would be first on any list

I am so happy with scaleway that I do not understand it is not in this list.

Thanks for the suggestion, didn't know this one! I will definitely take a look at it.

This is just great for beginners, thanks. Do you think of posting tips to deploy Anon?

great idea - biased execution.

missing a lot of good alternatives. It would be good to add a vote-ish button for each service to let people see the popularity.

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