Ask HN: Optimal cloud service to run tiny website with back end Python + SQLite? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Optimal cloud service to run tiny website with back end Python + SQLite?

73 pointsdjoldman77 comments

Web ninjas: What is your go-to cloud service for running a small website served with python + jinja2 + sqlite? The website does little besides searching an sqlite table, serving a form, and writing the form response to an sqlite table, all with minimal computation and bandwidth. Wants are:

  Low price
  Low maintenance time/cost
  Simplicity

My strengths do not include web development/servers but I know the basics. I'm particularly interested in the gotchas like: difficulties setting up SSL, transfer limits, and "X is perfect except that ____".

If I'm asking the wrong question or not providing enough info, please say so.

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Dokku + your favorite VPS: http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/

Installation is a breeze and there are plugins. If you're at all familiar with Heroku's deploy, you'll love this. It's the closest thing I've found to `git push` without any thinking.

Glad to see that dokku is still alive. Definitely recommend this.

Another vote for dokku, I moved all my projects there years ago and couldn't be more satisfied.

Dokku + Hetzner + CloudFlare here. It's just so simple. I love it.

I have noticed that deploys eat HDD for breakfast. Prune often. ("docker system df" helps show stats on space usage).

I have also read many optimisation guides talking about Alpine Linux images, but not sure whether that makes a difference.

Running a Go stack. Often wondering whether Caddy could be an alternative?

Sometimes I feel like this is still "too much". Like I still don't have enough control over the stack. Cloudflare introduces a lot of magic. I am not sure I fully grasp Dokku, but it works. Oh well!

Docker sacrifies disk space, but at least do you have /var/lib/docker on btrfs ?

Traefik is a reverse proxy for containers out of the box, apparently you would need some plugin to have that feature on Caddy : https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy

As such, it seems like Traefik would be easier to setup for your use case.

I just use `git push` without Dokku (something like https://gist.github.com/tasuki/5176431). What would Dokku give me?

I've used DigitalOcean (ref link -> https://m.do.co/c/a2a2c0826ff3) to host my Django sites, both with postgresql and sqlite. It will take you some time to figure out how to host it.

Once you a succeed each subsequent time becomes much easier. Plus you get to learn a ton about server management.

There are fantastic posts that will help you.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

Second this. DO is insanely easy to use and it provides solid footwork to delve into a bit of an actual production deployment process.

PRGMR.com 1.25 GiB RAM, 15 GiB Disk for $5 per month.

https://prgmr.com/xen/ inexpensive. no overage charges. can pay by bitcoin. (and a FreeBSD friendly).

I wonder if you would also benefit from installing something like yunohost [2] on top of Debian. This will get you your personal cloud. And the use YounoHost's 'Custom web app' container [4]

This way, you get an automatically configured web server (nginx), with certificates (via Let's encrypt) that get auto updated.

You also get a pre-configured user/sftp access to your app's folders.

And those folders will be backed up when you hit the backup button...

Nginx will invoke your python app when the predefined URL is hit.

All you have to do is to point your domain registrar to the prmgr VPS host running yunohost.

[2] https://yunohost.org/#/whatsyunohost [3] https://yunohost.org/#/apps [4] https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/my_webapp_ynh

Are you affiliated with the company? I chuckle when I see this hosting shop pop up on HN. They had advertisements on the dividers at the Safeway in Mountain View. Was wondering how they worked that.

nice word

because it is hard to work with that the virus is hard and everywhere is hot here in teaxs

To my best knowledge, I and lsc are the only people associated with prgmr.com who post semi-regularly on HN. lsc isn't involved much beyond having a minor stake in the company.

lsc set up the Safeway divider advertisements. It was pretty cheap, like $150 a month. I don't think we would do it again, but it certainly caught a lot of people's attention.

no.

I also know that they donate (or at least donated before now) hosting service to lobste.rs

I found them just by searching through like anybody else would.

I had never seen their ads.

are you affiliated with any of their competitors?

Nope. Just a Bay Area native who got into the local industry.

Google cloud run. If you can put your python app in a docker container (very easy) then you can run it on Cloud Run. They have a very generous “always free” tier.

Second. I'm running an appengine site, and it's nice to be able to deploy from command line. I'm using Mongo Atlas, but they have a free tier as well. If you don't mind an appengine domain, you can have a free friendly domain as well.

If SQLite sends writes to the disk you cannot use cloud run, as it does not have a persistent disk.

Yes sorry, I should have said also you can use their always free VM Compute Instance to run the DB.

I hate messing with nginx and ssl configurations that why I tried caprover (https://caprover.com/) on a vultr server. It handles ssl through let's encrypt and it even includes some nice monitoring tool. It needs some familiarity with docker if you want to fully use its features but in general I am running it on 2 servers with success and I am very happy. I totally recommend it.

Might not fit your needs exactly, but others looking for something similar might find NearlyFreeSpeech.NET a good fit: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

If you don't have too much load, heroku could be good for you, but you'll have to use postgresql. The free tier is nice though.

Having to use postgres seems like a plus :) besides being a great dbms, using postgres means you can port to other hosts easily, as opposed to say firebase.

I second heroku for OPs requirements, extremely easy to set up and manage, and the free tier handles many small sites well.

Whatever you choose, use cloudflare for free SSL.

try https://uberspace.de - name your own price (1-15€), HTTPS, python, sqlite, shell access, databases and much more included. Docs: https://manual.uberspace.de/ https://lab.uberspace.de/guide_django.html

disclaimer: I work for them, but used to be a customer long before I started.

How important is SQLite to you? I run https://crushentropy.com/ (high-res scheduling) on Google App Engine (Standard) with data persisted on Firebase. It costs me $0 per month.

So the user must, re-write his code to fit into firebase?

No, just saying that's an option to consider, that's all. If the current code is super small, it can be a quick change.

There are different kinds of "simple". SQLite sure is simple in several dimensions, but then you need a writable file system for it, and file locking is not an issue for your usecase etc.

I consider my set it and forget it setup to be simple, and I haven't had to do any maintenance in 3 years, though Firebase is not exactly what you'd call "simple".

http://pythonanywhere.com This guys specialize in python hosting and have a free tier

I too have a very good experience with them. Very, very simple and no hassle to set up.

In particular, all the web hosting side of things is preconfigured.

Love them always and still hosting with them. Will switch to paid one once I get some traffic. Excellent guys and hosting packages.

Second this.

AWS has a free tier for a year after signing up. A 'tiny' instance for webserver with letsencrypt on for your free ssl/tls certificates. You can automate backups via snapshots, though make sure they delete automatically after a week or so. I would recommend you use MySQL instead of SQlite, use RDS free tier there, SQlite not so good with concurrent connections and definately not if people are adding their own information. Look into haproxy as your gateway so you can scale to multiple servers if need to but not be tied into AWS specific Route 53, if you set it up right you can basically grab the configs, site source, files etc and a database dump and run it on a Raspberry PI in your home if you need to and have a static IP. Try not to get tied into one specific cloud provider too and keep shopping around for free or better deals. You can have a web presence for no money except your DNS registration with a little bit of tinkering and looking around.

The user says, a tiny site, why the over engineering? Unless we are speaking of tens of concurrent connections SQLITE works.

Check out google cloud run for running your stateless webserver, its free tier is pretty good and you can run whatever stateless container you want to.

Personally from there I would use a min-spec Postgres CloudSQL for the DB, but you can use whatever hosting you like if you want to DIY.

Amazon Web Services. Won't cost much.

If you want to keep it simple..

A very small EC2 box. Maybe even micro instance. That'll run your python code + sqlite.

If you want, you can use an elastic load balancer or Route53. If you don't have DNS already. Route53 is AWS's DNS service which is easy to use.

This whole setup should not cost you much. If you do it right, you can probably spend less than $10/month taking advantage of the free tier.

Later on, as a side project, you can try to make the app serverless. You're probably close to it being serverless. Doing this allows you to run it on AWS Lambda. Which makes things even cheaper, if not free. And it's just pretty cool.

But most likely you'd have to switch to a real data store. No problem since AWS has DynamoDB.

Absolutely nope. Both unfamiliar naming and the console interface is overwhelming, it's overkill to learn it just to run one VPS.

Not mentioned by others, http://atlantic.net starts at $5 a month. DigitalOcean has a similar offer with much better documentation. I run a couple of larger servers at DigitalOcean and am really satisfied with uptime, management console, etc. So my vote goes for DigitalOcean.

But Atlantic had a 256Mb RAM, 10Gb disk option years ago for just $0.99 I still have one server there for hosting static HTML, running some scraping tasks, MS document to PDF conversion service (Python Twisted) for a customer, etc. All that for just $1.20 a month (including VAT)

Here’s an easy example on Glitch that you can remix: https://glitch.com/~hello-python-flask-sqlite3

http://scaleway.com it costs 3$/month for a vps

Second.

Scaleway + Cloudflare + CapRover, you get the simplicity and joy of using PAAS without the cost. CapRover's one click install is awesome.

Would definitely be looking at removing the homespun server aspect and going with a high-performance, low latency paas / serverless setup. Lets you focus on and deliver the outputs you need (i.e. user interface + data).

If I were in your shoes I'd be looking at either:

- Firebase (free tier). Probably just using their RTDB for storage. You could conceivably do away with your backend entirely here.

- Cloudflare workers + KV storage (~$5 per month?) .. this would give you killer performance and let you write your storage logic in python. You're paying a minimum fee per month here, but in reality that could cover a large number of seperate sites.

Both suggestions raise vendor lock-in considerations, but given the use-case it doesn't seem like a major concern. Of course if you're looking forward to the joys of managing a box ...

DigitalOcean (or any of the $5 VPS) with Debian 10, you will need to know "basics" like SSH and typing some commands (a bunch of sudo apt-get _____) and then you are done. The only thing you don't have with DigitalOcean is domain name registration but everything else is there. Use them for DNS! They have some pre-built stuff for your list here but I would just spin up a blank Debian 10 box.

You can also get a free tier at Amazon AWS but you have to learn all the EC2 stuff and almost piece yourself a server one piece at a time (like the good old days where you build your own PC but clicking buttons) -- IMHO this takes much longer than just doing a $5 VPS and typing things. So if you want to learn Amazon AWS stuff, this may be a good path but it is going to take a lot longer

Python + SQLite AWS EC2 t2.micro

DNS + SSL Cloudflare free plan

Total cost = $0

I wrote this app last weekend mostly so that I could look at COVID-19 stats, but also as a learning exercise. I download data from John Hopkins, ingest it into a SQLite database and then have a couple of Python scripts to present an API to the front end. It is hosted on a Digitalocean droplet which costs me US$5.00 per month. Setup is easy - takes less than 10 minutes, and if you know Linux everything is pretty straightforward.

I also use Cloudflare as a DNS (free tier).

https://martin.schweitzer.id.au/covid19/

That's a pretty cool project. As a Sysadmin I know a bit of Python and how to use Rest APIs but would you mind pointing me in the right direction on how you present an API to the front end? I'd like to learn how to build a website like this.

A bit of a mix of the other comments, but I use a generic VPS (I use DO now, used to use EC2, but anything works) with my application wrapped in a Docker container with its port exposed. Nginx reverse proxy to pass from 80 to my container's port. After that is working, I use certbot and it automatically detects Nginx and offers to automatically set up TLS on 443 and redirect 80 -> 443 to ensure connections are coming through HTTPS. certbot is a god send.

I switched from DigitalOcean to Hetzner. https://www.hetzner.com/

If you want something fire and forget and since this is simple I would go with a serverless solution. Static files (with some little JS) hosted on some CDN and serverless database. One option is AWS dynamodb and their CDN, a more friendly beginner solution is firebase. You can't get more low maintenance than that.

Do you know of any existing tools for this on the server(less) part and database that aren't hard to setup?

The firebase docs are pretty good, they have lots of videos also if that's your thing.

Can your code work on AWS Lambda with one of their DB services? If you need it to scale with growth starting on a cloud platform will save headache later. If you don't need scaling it's possible you could run it on the permanently-free tiers or very low cost once you utilize the free quotas each month.

Oracle Cloud only if you can use a their free VPS tier. If you can't, then Heroku or a cloud free tier.

Friendly reminder that Oracle has no customers, only hostages.

Epic! Made my day

I tried Oracle cloud free tier, it was all good until they banned me few days in for no reason (they didn't say in the email).

You'd have to be logged in to contact support :D

I still use Webfaction for my webapps although since they were bought by GoDaddy, costumers seem to start moving away from it.. But it is quite simple to deploy a Python webapp, they have one-click installers and you can ftp your source files like we all used to do..

Prices start from 10$/month.

I moved to opalstack.com. Made by former WebFaction employees. Loving it.

I like AWS Lambda with RDS and Cloudfront or whatever. It can be a pain setting up the VPC and security stuff, but it seems worth it because as far as I can tell it is extremely reliable and there is no server to maintain or secure.

https://www.wholesaleinternet.net/dedicated/

Dedicated server.

16GB memory. 2TB of drive space. $25.00/mo

Another vote for DigitalOcean.

It's just a computer connected to the internet.

Used to do everything on Digital Ocean but had better performance on Vultr for the same price.

But either will do. My use was crypto trading bots, also using SQLite for storage.

Maybe try out glitch.com . Search for Python examples.

www.pythonanywhere.com Nice little setup where you get python set up out of the box, and you even have some options of quickly setup database if you need to go beyond sqlite.

It's very flexible, cheap and definitely a time saver for when you want something up and running quickly.

Small hosting (whichever you like best), plus cloudflare for DNS and transparent caching.

I just wanted to say since you seem unsure of yourself a little:

You have a really great approach to simple software. Turns out your strengths do include setting up backends for web development!

Many self styled experts / People 2 digit years of experience who consider themselves solution architects could learn from you and your approach here.

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode

Find a friend with a hobby linode server who will put it up for free.

Scaleway, with or without their DBaaS offer if you need more perf

Linode/DigitalOcean

digital ocean, the cheapest VPS bucks one.

how about a raspberry pi and dyndns?

I would worry about being DoS'ed, and having my home network compromised because of a vulnerability in raspberry pi software stack. Other than that, I think it's a good idea. I do the same for a personal use server, but don't expose the port on the public internet.

If you put Pi in a segmented network this is a good solution. That's what I do now anyway with python + sqlite and Netgate sg-1100 as a firewall

I suggest aws (probably elasticbeanstalk, maybe a raw box) simply because it's a very well trodden path. Lots of helpdocs, tutorials, instructions, etc etc etc.

Assuming you're a professional in the US / west europe, etc, the diff between $20 or $30/mo and $5 or $0 per month is negligible, while the time savings just from staying on a standard path can be huge.

My default suggestion would be:

Elastic Load Balancer, to talk to the internet and terminate SSL;

Elastic Beanstalk or something similar to host a box;

Certificate Manager for your SSL cert;

Route53 to serve your DNS.

All of the above should be cheap and, again, a very well trodden path with tons of help docs and people familiar with configuration.

That sounds completely overkill for OPs question - without digging deeper it sounds like OP really just wants a cheap VPS perhaps with a lightweight management layer on top.

Granted, Elastic Beanstalk/Load Balancer will allow you to scale should you end up with a massive influx of traffic - but I think you'd be far faster to spin up a VPS and use where-ever your bought your domain name from to point your domain name to it's IP.

In fact - this is exactly what I do and it took well under an hour including choosing and buying a domain name and costs $5 a month.

I didn't intend any of this to be about scale. Again, it's about ease of setup and maintenance.

For example, I spent a pile of time getting letsencrypt to work with nginx. Admittedly, this was a couple years ago, but I had to go back in and fiddle with a config I barely remembered 6-ish months ago.

My ELB + AWS Certificate + EB have kept chugging along without a peep. I also ticked the EB setting to continually upgrade linux to take care of OS-level security issues.

You may be an expert on setting up linux/nginx/puma/bundler/ruby, but I've found that running my own (which I do!) requires a full couple days of maintenance a year. Again, from a person who does not do this regularly.

My AWS EB environment just does a new deploy and the magic keeps on magicking itself.

:shrug:

Don't get me wrong, I love that stack and it's what I generally use professionally, but for a small personal project that may or may not live for a whole year, I'd go for something cheap and cheerful, the difference between $5 a month and $30 is $300 a year - that's a whole lot of pizza and beer! ;)

FWIW - Setting up Let's Encrypt doesn't seem much of a chore these days: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secu...

For my particular use-case (a personal blog) the software I wanted to run on a VPS had support for it so all I really had to do was install everything answer a few configuration questions and I was up and running.

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