Ask HN: How do you host your side projects?
Do you use databases? What is your monthly traffic? What is your technology stack? Provide some context, please.
(If interested, affiliate link w/free domain offer: https://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?1405127/signup|confessions)
1. Think of a great idea for a side project. 2. Purchase domain at GoDaddy with [usually] 35% discount. 3. Host website at DreamHost. 4. Design and code website / side project. 5. Test it and ensure it works to at least 90% of the time. 6. Put it on DreamCompute (Cloud hosting provided by DreamHost) where it is a faster and independent server.
I usually code in PHP and Javascript. I use DreamObjects from DreamHost which is basically AWS which is technically a very stable CDN ... I believe I've had 99.9%, maybe even 100% uptime.
On my busiest website hosted on DreamCompute ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com) : I normally receive about 1,000 visitors daily. Sometimes it spikes depending on whats trending or if something goes viral. For a few weeks, I was getting 10,000-20,000 visitors a day and the website handled very well... it didn't go down at all.
On my average website hosted on Shared Hosting ( https://mypost.io ): I normally receive about 100 visitors daily. Occasionally things go viral and I'll get 300-500 visitors a day in blocks.
As for my other side projects.. they aren't really public or traffic is too low to mention. And I normally MySQL databases for everything.
It prevents most bots from getting through, at least automated bots that seek out empty input boxes and add random stuff to them and attempt to hit a submit button. I had tried Google Recaptcha but there were just too many issues with it, for whatever reason, so I had created my own. I'm still experimenting with several different measures for improving the captcha. I've had two attacks since its creation 2 years ago. The spammer was able to create over 5,000 posts in just a few hours.
The first spammer actually emailed me and was pissed off. The entire email was in Russian but it translated into: "Why did you delete all of my posts I created?" Definitely correlated as it was just a few hours after I deleted them that I received that email.
The most recent attack was just a few weeks ago. I added some additional "captures" which seems to have prevented anything further. These pages were also in Russian and basically just linked to random forums all over the Internet. I don't think MyPost has any potential to give "rank" at all, but I'm pretty sure it's being done for backlinks. It may be that the "spammer" is a live person that goes through the source code and actually writes their own code to break through and create posts on MyPost.
The only thing I can keep doing for the time being is learning their methods and implementing new measures to prevent them from getting through, just as they continue to learn mine. There was a Show HN a few days ago that actually encrypted passwords on the client side, so I may look into that code and revise it to work as a captcha.
I'm not saying this was a great or even good solution, but attackers would at least have to do OCR on the image to crack it, as opposed to examining the js on the page.
And while it might seem like -- oh well for them -- having to deal with challenges in the real world is hard enough, and now they'd have to face it on the Internet too? So that is why I am trying to come up with a captcha system that can fool bots, but is human-friendly and not complicated just the same. Google's No-Captcha Recaptcha usually works great and I have used it on other websites, but for some reason, unfortunately on MyPost, it had failed me, either not "seeing" my answer as correct, or just not working as it should.
But I do appreciate your suggestion le-mark.
More dynamic apps can be hosted on Google Compute Engine's free tier. Single core Xeon vCPU with 600Mb RAM. Enough to run Ubuntu 16.04, Caddy, and a pipeline of concurrent golang micro-services in parallel for maybe a few simultaneous users per second ;)
Use Firebase or Cloud Datastore free tiers for real-time data persistence.
You'll get warnings about load, asking you to upgrade to a medium instance in the control panel. But it suffices for an MVP and to gauge interest. And it's effortless to scale when all you have is golang binaries, systemctl service scripts and API keys. No Docker Required!
To get even more minimal, try architecting a serverless solution. Best of luck!
For another project that I did in Elm and threw some ads up I use Namecheap hosting (with no database).
Finally, for consulting and for my upcoming project (Blog engine in Elixir with no dependencies on Phoenix, just Plug) I'm probably going to be using Digital Ocean droplet with a self-hosted PostgreSQL, though I may end up doing either Amazon Container service with RDS or Google's Kubernetes Service with RDS or Google's version of RDS.
I also use DO for deployments with the contracting work I'm working on to show clients progress.
On my "server" -- actually a desktop PC used headlessly (specs for anyone wondering: i7-4790, 32GB RAM, 2TB raid with 2xWD Re drives, 20 min APC UPS, 100/100 connection)
Projects are separated using LXC containers or Docker, KVM/QEMU wasted too much memory.
For anything that gains a lot of traffic or is a bit more critical -- luckily(?) only one at the moment -- same setup but on online.net dedicated servers.
Stack is all over the place, from Java to Python to Go, from Postgres to MongoDB to flat files, you get the idea.
I think my current favorite stack would be node + mongo + vue for a side project. Sure people hate mongo for big projects, but it's just so stinking convenient.
Tech stack: go, php, c, python, sqlite, mysql, nginx, redis, aws s3
Traffic: couple 10 thousand maybe
Can you please recommend a resource / book for VPS newby?
Now opinion; it really makes me sad that the world has moved this way, that developers are now expected to be sys admins. I do it myself. I'm a pretty good developer, but I'm no sys admin. I feel like sys admin as a profession has been devalued to an astonishing degree in recent years. I blame the easy and cheap availability of cloud services like linode and digital ocean and developer moving in mass to procuring and provisioning their own servers.
I'm to blame as well, but a good sys admin brings A LOT to the table. Keeping configuration sane and secure, keeping things patched. I've worked with a few who are really good, I miss having good sys admins when the job doesn't have them.