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Comment by pdenya | Hacker News Reader

EC2 has a tier thats free for a year. So does Heroku if you're using a language/framework they support. I believe PHP fog does as well.

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Would you happen to have links to any of these offers? A quick (albeit minimal) search doesn't reveal a "free for a year" option on any of these, instead EC2 and Heroku have pricing calculators that imply free only if hardly used.

In all of those cases I also presume I need to "bring my own" DNS registration and forwarding - whereas some of the cheaper hosts will let you register a name for a year as part of your subscription.

Thanks!

http://www.heroku.com/pricing#1-0

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Both of these are free for a year despite te confusing hourly breakdown.

I'll have to look into the heroku then. I've had an amazon AWS account for some time (though I've mainly used it just to try things out myself before recommending to a client), and so don't appear to be able to use the one year option.

Thanks for the links!

Speaking from experience, Heroku's free tier doesn't hold up well against "Show HN"-type traffic.

That was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to hear - not that there were problems with Heroku, but which systems held up for folks. Given your earlier message, I presume you used Linode and it held up ok?

Yeah, Linode works fine. The primary issue with Heroku is that the free tier only serves one request at a time, so if you get a rush of traffic, you end up with a big backed up request queue. On Linode, that's not an issue, unless you have a behemoth app that takes up so much RAM that you can't use more than one worker at a time.

I can testify that an EC2 micro (free tier) instance stands up to some level of traffic as long as your site is built well.

It is also easy to scale that instance in the case that you need even more capacity and are willing to pay a bit more for the expected high traffic time period.

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