Ask HN: Startup development infrastructure - ec2, cloud services or own servers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Startup development infrastructure - ec2, cloud services or own servers?

I'm just starting a job with a startup and we'll now have a team of developers instead of just one—which means setting up source control, continuous integration and backups.

Anyone have any advice on best practices or good solutions to this? We're considering either an ec2 instance, a physical server in our office, or a reasonable set of cloud services.

Details: a few developers and a designer, Java web apps and an Android app, probably Jenkins for continuous integration, git for source control.

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We used heroku until the free tier wasn't enough. Then AWS, though it does have a initial learning curve. AWS is really flexible, but you do have to become a bit of a sys admin.

That seems to make no sense at all to me. $50 a month for a db and 2 dynos has to be cheaper than AWS+your time sys-admining everything.

Now I'm not saying there aren't other reasons to not use heroku, but yours doesn't seem reasonable to me. Care to elaborate a little for us?

I am running off a managed dedicated server because server adminstration just isn't something I want to deal with and my concerns about scaling/growth aren't there yet. I guess it probably depends on your situation, if there is someone in your office who has a really strong opinion and the knowledge to implement it, perhaps that would work best for your group?

Good point, considering the capabilities. If you do everything with EC2, you should stick with it. Otherwise, if your developer box is Linux, you are probably able to admin a dedicated Linux server (for the build environment) as well, no?

On the other hand, it makes sense to develop Cloud skills at some stage as well, and you might want to screw it up with the test&build server first, before setting up the production server ;) Probably depends as well then on how much time you have?

The sooner you get set up on the cloud or any VPS host the better. Hosting your site from a desktop in your office is pretty ghetto in this day in age.

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