Ask HN: Where would you host a quickly bootstrapped site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where would you host a quickly bootstrapped site?

3 pointsmkaziz9 comments

I've been using heroku recently, but am wondering as to alternatives people use. This is just for hobbyist development and I'm fairly cost-conscious at the moment.

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Digital Ocean is great for small projects . . . and it's nice to you can host multiple projects on one droplet.

If you're using Laravel check out https://forge.laravel.com/.

It makes it super easy to get up and running on Digital Ocean and http://laravel.com/docs/homestead provides a quick and easy VM to match what forge sets up on Digital Ocean.

Plus it's easy to setup multiple small projects on the same droplet. Forge is $10/mo but it supports Laravel and does save time setting up and configuring Digital Ocean along with easy deployment.

Host it on Digital Ocean. You can host multiple projects on same Droplet. When the traffic/load picks up for one project and can't be handled on one droplet, you can spin it out to a separate droplet. When load increases further, upgrade the droplet to larger expensive plan.

I started out with $5 droplet for my projects. Now one of my project that gained traction is on $10 droplet and rest still on $5 droplet.

Personally I avoid any PaaS/IaaS that require custom development hooks specific to their platforms to maintain my operational and hosting flexibility.

I still don't quite understand the value proposition behind DO and why people have started using it over AWS. So far I understand that it has a nice interface and is a bit (but not much) cheaper for certain server configurations. But that can't be all, right?

Could anyone explain why DO is becoming so popular?

AWS is akin to building your car by buying and installing one part at a time. DO is akin to buying a Honda Fit. AWS is good when you got Cadillac budget. AWS has a sweet spot. When your needs are too small or too large, AWS is not the right solution.

AWS integration is complex due to multitude of services priced separately and need to be integrated separately. For early stage projects, this creates unnecessary complexity. The costs of these services quickly add up too.

As you embed more and more AWS services into your projects, you become locked in and unable to migrate off quickly. That is when AWS tells you to bend over and empty your pockets. You lose flexibility to move.

I have primarily investigated minimal of services on AWS and DO and found DO to better and quickly fit my needs.

DigitalOcean, spend a couple of hours getting a server setup that covers your general stack and then save it as an image. Then in the future you can just boot a new server on that image for $5 p/m.

I 2nd DO. I haven't found anything else that beats the price. I'm moving all my stuff there from Amazon.

If you can swing a static+javascript. Hosting on github pages seems to be popular, or AWS S3+CDN.

I agree, if it was anything that would have any slight possibility of eventually becoming something larger, I would go for DO on the get go.

But if its a proof of concept for a relatively light footprint and low performance app then heroku would easily do the job.

Static website: S3 on AWS, Web app: Digital Ocean (can support multiple apps too, run Nginx on the same machine)

Linode. It's the host I currently use.

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