Linode Managed Databases
linode.com
linode.com
The cheapest option here is $15 a month, and similar prices for other cloud managed dbs.
Heroku was nice and I guess is still a good option, but hard to make a usable site on their free tier because of start up time.
Then there's the interesting new option from Cloudflare, D1.
Currently I just run my personal project on AWS lambda + dynamodb. It's free, but using dynamodb for relational data is a little awkward.
I'm also super interested in Cloudflare D1, looking to get my hands on it and try it out.
It doubles the cost of V1 and they have the gall to say:
> most Aurora Serverless customers can lower costs by moving to v2 due to a lower starting capacity of 0.5 ACU (vs. 1 ACU in v1)
Oh, why thank you AWS, how kind of you. I can go to 0.5? That doesn't matter at all, the price is the save as 1 ACU on V1.
D1 is interesting but if you want Serverless MySQL then check out PlanetScale [0]. It's free for hobby projects (it will turn off if you go 1 week with no activity) and then it's a flat $30/mo and you can have 2 production branches and 5 development branches. I've been very happy with them so far. The usage-based pricing is a little scary (I know I don't think in rows read/written) but the limits are super high and so far my usage has been barely a blip.
I migrated from RDS Aurora Serverless V1 after being frustrated with the high prices (V2 is even worse) and the annoyance of sleeping DBs (for my dev/qa environments, I couldn't afford $45x3/mo). Now I get all 3 for only $30/mo and safe/easy schema migrations. It's been a joy to work with and their support has been very responsive. This week is a "launch week" for them so you'll probably see a few posts about it this week and I encourage you check them out if you are looking for scalable managed MySQL DBs.
Development - Single node, 1x shared CPU, 256MB RAM, 1GB disk
https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/#postgresql-clusters https://fly.io/docs/reference/postgres/
2 free 500MB PostgreSQL db's, paused after a week of inactivity
Planetscale has a similar offering with mysql compatibility but I've not tried it.
Why go the more pricey/complicated route?
It's free, probably faster in many cases and several times simpler than any alternative.
There is nothing to patch manually. Security updates are handled automatically via "unattended-upgrades" for Ubuntu and when the OP says,
> tiny, almost free, sql database for personal projects
running "mysqldump" on a cron job sounds enough to me.
> with reasonable disaster recovery
You may send that dump file to any S3 based storage anywhere in the world for a decent disaster recovery. (Tools like restic allows automatic data rotation easily.)
Launching an instance (even use "MySQL" app instance cloud providers provide) and installing MySQL with 1 command, write a few lines of shell script to take a daily backup should take at most an hour.
Optionally, install Caddy web server and set up a few lines for PHP fpm or for other languages a single line to reverse proxy for automatic Let's Encrypt and your site is up. I'm sure there are plenty of tutorials on that.
Once things are up, there's nothing to manage. It gives you flexibility with lower price, not to mention gives you the little knowledge you likely want to have down the road.
Sure at the higher of traffic and usage you might want to outsource, but it's stupidly easy to get reasonable performance and security with the defaults or the most basic of configs.
You can actually learn a lot about db's (and become a better user of the db) by actually knowing what some of the configs do as well.
I am not the OP but I setup a fairly expensive server to run my Postgres,redis,and other fire and forget processes. Now, five years later, I have never once had to login to change anything.
And thanks to that I saved thousands of dollars versus what I would have paid for a managed systems of the same performance so I could do all kinds of wild experimental projects that would’ve otherwise been too expensive.
The uptime has been phenomenal. We would have hit 5 years uptime, except briefly the data center caught fire resulting in a few hours of downtime.
Most of the time, I don't need to be as good or better then the cloud provider. I just need to "be good enough".
Just keep unattended-upgrades do the important updates without any manual labors.
Someone else mentioned Fly.io, have a look at Render too.
> free databases are deleted [after 90 + 14 days]
> (unless they are upgraded to a paid plan)
1,90 €/month with a TLD included. Won't get much cheaper for a "carefree" solution.
It was not built to serve relational needs. You can bend it that way, though. Of course it will look like something that has been bent.
- Fly.io
- railway.app
- render.com
- Oracle Cloud free tier
These are the services that I know of that you can get some kind of relation DB to run on for free
Akamai to Acquire Linode (https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-to-acqu...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30352772
986 points | nycdatasci | 3 months ago | 326 comments
Vultr (have had reliability issues; again no recent data)
It’s perhaps a little too easy to bump into their initial account spending limits, but that’s about the only nit I can pick. It’s probably pretty tiresome fighting fraud on a VPS platform.
It was one of the most infuriating exchanges I've had with support staff from any company. If there was any redeeming factor, it's that the COO sent a long email apologizing for the CSR's behavior. But when all was said and done, the VPS was still inaccessible a dozen or more times per day, and an apology from an executive doesn't change that.
One unique thing about Vultr is that they provide HDD block storage which is way cheaper than SSD one which seems to be the only option for any other clouds. If you need a large disk like for backups, Vultr is pretty attractive.
Up until recently, I had free block storage and snapshots from them, plus a bunch of credits for discovering some security vulnerabilities in their web site. Pretty good value even at today's pricing.
Your mileage may vary.
[1] https://www.vultr.com/ [2] https://upcloud.com/ [3] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud [4] https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/ [5] https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
EDIT: also have years of experience with Linode, Vultr, DigitalOcean, and even Upcloud (Spanish company as I recall).
The other ones are quite straightforward.
Their cloud servers are very cheap (like half the cost of other low cost competitors) but again, very limited regional presence outside Europe. At least they added US region lately.
Its basically protect by one single raid cluster.
I'm really looking forwards to Mega's S4 offering, it very compatitvely priced and is encrypted, and it looks like of have the same kind of data protection as normal mega services.
Triton is open source[3], so you can run it in your own facility, at home, and our Public Cloud with the same experience.
[0]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com
[1]: https://www.joyent.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-for-triton-...
[1] https://www.tilaa.com/ [2] https://www.tilaa.com/en/blog/tilaa-cloud-database-beta-is-l...
Credit where its due though, DO have a great UI for resource visualiation and firewall rules which is what's currently keeping me from moving.
I'm 24/7 doing 300 tran/s with ~20% cpu utilization and it only costs $27.34 a month. I just upgraded to Postgres 14 (from 13) with a click of a button and a few seconds of switchover downtime. Seems more than worth the price.
1. My application needs postgres as it uses a few specific queries that sqlite does not support the same way. Hello `interval`.
2. Backups are automatic and transparent.
3. Upgrades, instance sizing and disk expansion are just a few clicks away.
4. I don't have to deal with hosting, power, internet, security.
5. Charts, logs, metrics all built in.
6. On the same network as the rest of the frontend... gcp functions.
Just one of those alone is worth the $300/yr imho.
Btw Sqlite can go a long way:
https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/
https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-q...
"going a long way" on sqlite would have really end up biting me in the ass as soon as my app needed to scale beyond it. now i've written a bunch of sqlite specific queries (ex: show me all the rows that were modified over 10 minutes ago) that i'd need to spend time migrating and testing on another database.
in my case, i had no idea what the actual load on my database was going to be. i knew i'd be sending it a constant stream of traffic and the traffic would grow over time, but until i did that, there was no (easy) way to load test it.
i started with the $7/mo option and when i grew out of that, a couple clicks later i was onto the $13/mo option. unloading the points i outlined above from my concerns allowed me to focus on building features instead of infrastructure.
it is all about perspective and approaching things in a way that is logical, not thinking in terms of the latest HN headlines. this app is the backend for something generating many millions of dollars a year in revenue. $300/mo is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
I've lost the point of your message though. Your original response suggested a RPI... which is about $35 just for the base hardware and it doesn't do nearly what I outlined above.
Most of my queries are super simple and most of the load is an update statement on a primary key column.
#1 query is: `insert into on conflict do update` (based on id column).
57 writes/s
281 trans/s
~12-15 connections
547 megs used
e.g. "Linode 2GB" - I assume that means it has 2 GB of RAM, but how much storage does that entail
Can't find it on their page
It's been in Beta for literally years now.
"Years" is quite a stretch. On December 30, 2019, they announced[1] bare metal servers as being part of their roadmap for 2020, and then on June 16, 2021 they announced the beta was "upcoming." Given the necessity of on-site labor to launch a bare metal service, I think it's perfectly reasonable for it take more than a year in the midst of a pandemic.
[1] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/2019-a-year-in-review/
[2] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/celebrating-18-years/
https://web.archive.org/web/20201026191156/https://www.linod...
That’s 1.6 years ago.
Also, the page you're linking to has a gigantic "coming soon" banner at the top, which would indicate it's not actually available. Its call to action is not to purchase a bare metal server, but instead a link to register for their Green Light program, which lists the bare metal beta as "upcoming."
So, no, the beta hasn't been available for years, you're still ignoring that whole "on-site labor in the middle of a pandemic" thing, and I can't imagine why you felt like an attempt at publicly shaming them twice was necessary.
My day job has changed a lot since 2013. Could I, in clear conscious, recommend Linode to a client today? I would need to know each incident in detail and how they've changed and be convinced the past is staying in the past. My setup has always been there when i needed it and support has always been responsive and that goes a long ways. However, we all know a secure environment is at the top of the list.
To be fair, I'm evaluating Hetzner now, because I just want affordable and performant virtual machines, while Linode are moving their focus to managed services because they're more profitable and are a great way to lock in their customers. Linode is no longer competitive if you just need to rent VPSes.
Disclaimer: I work there.
I want to get away from digitalocean because theyre trying to do too much in too many disparate spaces, which is a feeling I hold the same for -all- of the other platforms, GCP, AWS, etc. What I guess I was assuming would exist would be a service with their own concerns, their own staff, end to end hosting some managed clusters on their own hardware.
When something breaks, I dont ever want to hear about an upstream provider unless it is an ISP or Colo, and nor should I. I want the world of service providers to take ownership of their entire stack, possibly that is not realistic in 2022.
As Im typing this, Im realizing, I need to just get my own colo cage and rack up my own hardware. Its frustrating as ever to come to this realization. I essentially want a patch monkey with a penchant for backups and resource monitoring. I dont care about elastic someshits, I dont care about cute terms for pricing units like dynos, I absolutely dont want to call for pricing (scylla, this is on you).
Its hard not to think im just completely wrong when the way i think things should be is the complete opposite of the way things are. This comment has been both cathartic and revealing.