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Comment by lazarus01 | Hacker News Reader

I just wanted to learn how to create an enterprise grade web application. I read a book on Django last year and did a few tutorials and enjoyed it. I also deploy infra on gcp and it works well there. It cost about $60/month for baseline hosting with light traffic/storage. I will probably use it for an interface for some of my ml projects. I was also looking into dart/flutter a much steeper learning curve for me personally.

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This is pretty much how I began developing websites too. Except it was 2001 instead of 2026. And it was ASP (the classic ASP that predates ASP.NET) instead of Python. And I had a Windows 98 machine in my dorm room with Personal Web Server (PWS) running on it instead of GCP.

It could easily have been a static website, but I happened to stumble across PWS, which came bundled with a default ASP website. That is how I got started. I replaced the default index.asp with my own and began building from there. A nice bonus of this approach was that the default website included a server-side guestbook application that stored comments in an MS Access database. Reading through its source code taught me server-side scripting. I used that newfound knowledge to write my own server-side applications.

Of course, this was a long time ago. That website still exists but today most of it is just a collection of static HTML files generated by a Common Lisp program I wrote for myself. The only parts that are not static are the guestbook and comment forms, which are implemented in CL using Hunchentoot.

I remember ASP (application service provider, before cloud became synonymous with hosting), you are making me nostalgic. Back then I was in sales, I was selling real time inventory control, CRM and point of sale systems distributed over Citrix Metaframe in a secure datacenter. Businesses were just starting to get broadband connections. I would have to take customers to the datacenter to motivate them to let us host their data. Eight years later, google bought the building for $1.8b and eventually bought adjacent buildings as well.

We are talking about different ASPs. I am referring to Active Server Pages (ASP), the server-side scripting language supported by Personal Web Server (PWS) and Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows. It is similar to PHP Hypertext Processor (PHP) and Java Server Pages (JSP) but for the Windows world. I began developing websites with ASP. Over the years, I dabbled with CGI, PHP, JSP, Python, etc. before settling on Common Lisp as my preferred choice for server-side programming.

Got it! It's amazing how many languages are out there... very interesting

$60/mo for a personal website is insane.

I agree. To be more clear, that $60 is an estimate for a small configuration and includes serverless infrastructure to process 500,000 requests per month, plus storage, including a 20gb sql database and 100gb of object storage to serve video and images. More ideal for an application. You run the app in a container and only get charged for the requests, the sql database is persistent, so that cost $20/month and object storage with egress is about $10/month.

Let me describe my setup, so that you can compare. I use a Contabo VPS for around 5 USD month to host my Wagtail (django-based) site. The DB also runs on the same infra and since it's SQLite I can back it up externally.

I probably wouldn't be able to handle 0.5M requests, but I am nowhere near getting them. If I start approaching such numbers I'll consider an upgrade.

Check out Wagtail if you'd like to have even more batteries included for your site, it was a delight building my site with it:

https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/hello-wagtail/

Thank you for sharing your setup, I will certainly examine it and compare a bit later. I know my setup is a bit over the top, but it is the easiest to learn, since I live in gcp everyday. I certainly don't expect the .5m traffic, but that is one of the lower tiers for cloud run, serverless execution service. This is just a poc to get my fingers dirty with the MVT pattern.

Gotcha. Yes, with just a VPS you have to do a lot of busywork to get online - DNS, reverse proxy, docker, dev environment, DB setup and others.

I'd still recommend starting with SQLite, seems that by skipping a DB service you can save quite a few bucks.

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