Ask HN: Where do you host your side projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you host your side projects?

Heroku, Firebase and Netlify usually. I'm using Firebase and Netlify for https://www.checkbot.io/ at the moment (it's a Chrome extension that tells you how to improve your website). Minimal hosting costs and I don't have to worry about what happens when traffic picks up.

Most of my stuff is at Linode; but for the last new project I spun up, I moved to Hetzner just because the pricing is so much better.

Can you tell about your usage vs bill on both? Doesn't have to be accurate.

I'd have to go back and look up all the details, and it's not apples-to-apples anyway, as I have just one VPS at Hetzner, and several at Linode. But just going by the VPS specs and the published pricing, I was impressed enough to do the experiment of deploying this one app to Hetzner as a trial of sorts. If it goes well, I may move more, or even all, of our stuff to them. I estimate I'd save at least 50% off of what I pay Linode today by doing so.

The one downside, of course, is that all of their datacenters are in Europe. So if your customers are not in Europe, and latency is a big issue, then that could complicate things.

Latency is probably not that much of a deal if costs are half.

Yeah, especially while this is in beta mode. If we start getting serious traction, we might be forced to move, or distribute the app to other providers to ensure good QoS everywhere. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

As the old saying goes "that would be a good problem to have".

Yup, definitely a good problem to have.

How are speeds compared to Linode? I currently use them, and have gotten a fairly consistent 1Gbps. I'm also curious about their management functionality. Linode is very good there; I particularly appreciate the lish console for if I lock myself out. Any such equivalent there?

How are speeds compared to Linode?

Too early to tell here. The site hasn't been promoted yet and is in "private beta" mode, so the traffic is trivial. Subjectively, when I visit for testing and admin stuff, it feels fine, even though the servers are in Europe and I'm on the US East Coast.

I'm also curious about their management functionality.

I find Linode's stuff to be a little better from a UX perspective, but I have no particular complaints about Hetzner so far. But keep in mind, I'm running one app there that I stood up a month ago, which has no paying customers yet. So I can't exactly offer the most in-depth critique ever.

Yeah, not a fan of the whole european server thing. Needless lag when no non-American will use it. Also, not a fan of European regulations. Having a European server might make me subject to GDPR (?) (or other regs I don't know about), a risk I don't want to take.

I self-host some, with the rest at Linode. Self-hosting is a little hard for me as I don't have much hardware; I'm hosting various services on Raspberry Pis and old laptops with one rpi as a reverse proxy for all. Though I don't recommend it to everyone, as there's a serious security risk if you don't know what you're doing.

Yes, that's risky indeed unless you know what you're doing.

How do you do it?

I close down everything on the home gateway box but one publickey from one ip (hardened cloud server) with secure ciphers and protocol 2 only. Non-standard port. Cloud server acts as a jump box, only allowing login from lan ips (requiring vpn first). This is, in no small part, because of the awful quality of most isp-issued router/firewall combos.

I’ve been happy with Digital Ocean. It’s versatile, and so far reliable for mainly small to kid-sized projects. YMMV. From what I understand they’ve improved over the years.

Digital Ocean: Reliable, flexible location choice (US, EU, SG), simple, good pricing for what I need (mainly, small instances, one instance dedicated for one project).

Either Hetzner or DigitalOcean. Both have handy API's which makes deploying new nodes easy (ansible, terraform, ...).

Digital Ocean and AWS. More on AWS recently because I also want to try some new services (e.g. AI) it provides

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