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Comment by Vhaeraun | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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