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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

For less than 1% of OP's monthly bill, you can build or obtain a more-than-enough server, drop your static files on it, and serve through nginx. And you get to keep it forever; there's no monthly subscription fee!

Seriously, maybe I'm just old, but I look at the pricing of these hip and modern SaaS products for dead simple software and I cannot believe my eyes. The "old fashioned way" works just fine (and has always worked just fine) and is orders of magnitude cheaper.

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Hetzner or DigitalOcean with Coolify [0] works great, it's like an open source Heroku that runs on any host, you get git push to deploy, and a bunch of other features built in. It only works on one machine at a time though so it's not like a CDN but for small sites, it's great.

[0] https://coolify.io

I use DigitalOcean to host some things (with my own setup for deployments with git push, because `curl | bash` is not a great way to install/maintain software).

How am I protected against extra charges for traffic?

Same here, using DigitalOcean instead of Vercel to host my Next.js app. I have a billing alert to notify of unexpected bills, but I don't know what DO does if somehow TBs of traffic are sent to my apps or Cloudflare, because DO App Platform actually uses Cloudflare behind the scenes.

But you need a static IP, stable internet, UPS, and permission from your wife to have a 24/7 powered noisy box in a room

I pay less than $5/mth for a VPS with static IP and 1GB/mth transfer. If I get close to any of my CPU/Memory/Disk/Transfer capacity I get a friendly email letting me know that I might want to add more capacity.

I mean, the C10k problem was coined in 1999[0]. A 10W raspberry pi is going to be faster than any server of that day, so it depends on what exactly you are hosting if you need the noisy box.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem

How sensitive are you if you think a rpi is noisy?

You don't need a static IP. You can use dynamic DNS or a free product such as Cloudflare Tunnel.

Dynamic type IP doesn't usually change for no reason, work around whatever instability you have, set BIOS so PC auto-restarts and OS launches apps when failed power returns, get a mini fanless PC which can be easily concealed, and you don't even need to tell anyone who doesn't have a need to know.

Whether that includes your wife or not is up to you ;)

Having built serverless apps and "old-fashioned" apps, I seriously believe the old fashioned way is better.

The best of both worlds is to host on AWS EC2 or a similar product from your web service provider of choice.

EC2 is so much more expensive than a standard VPS from almost any other provider though. If you're not embedded heavily in other AWS products I don't think it's worth bothering with EC2 - LightSail is way more cost effective and gets you most of the features.

A lot less than 1%.

I mean you gotta put your server somewhere (I guess hosting it on your connection?)

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