Hackers where do you host your projects?
Howdy indie hackers!
Maybe you're like me and have a handful of side projects that you've worked on over the years. I've hosted them with various providers like AWS, Digital Ocean, Azure, Heroku, etc.
I'm nearing the deployment of another small side project and I started thinking about where to host it. So I thought I would reach out to my fellow indie hackers and ask you: Who do you use for hosting and more importantly why?
Digital Ocean. It's easy to set up, cheap and scalable. Can't ask for much more.
Digital Ocean was a pleasure to use and they have great support. I just wish they had a PaaS offering. For my simple projects, I like something like Heroku where I can just push and deploy.
Can't you use dokku at DO? They have it as a one-click app and it's pretty much similar to heroku, they can even use the same buildpacks.
I'm running dokku on DO and now vultr. It works great.
I love everything about DO, except their support. It leaves a whole lot to be desired in my opinion.
Heroku is just to damn expensive and really for Postgre there's nothing better than RDS for cost/ease of setup.
I also use it, pretty neat, hassle free. I am hosting my static fronted on github pages. Probably will need to revisit that in the future.
Static pages
Excellent hosting for very cheap, if not free.
Dynamic / server-sides / bots
(I used to host on DigitalOcean, but eventually I chose to trade nice UI for better costs/perf ratio)
git pushthanks to Dokku.Not as easy as Heroku (you'll need to manage / update / secure your server), but definitely cheaper, as you can install as many apps/workers/DB you need.
Domains / DNS
Namecheap is... well, cheap. And Cloudflare provides a lot of value for free. And Let's Encrypt, well... can't beat free too ;)
which hugo templates used?
Used victor-hugo as a boilerplate, then custom design.
awesome.. me too use gohugo for landing pages ..
Google Cloud Platform and Firebase. It is more expensive than Digital Ocean but it is fully managed and offers a lot of integrations with services that can simplify your daily tasks.
I'll throw an asterisk in here as it depends on the services you use. I'm using Firebase products and using Google Functions and pay pennies per month. So far it's been working out great!
Yep, the free slot is generous. As you said, it depends on the service but should be careful when a service becomes popular.
I used AWS EC2 for hosting all my projects. It is cheaper and highly scalable. Since I am using AWS other services like S3, SES, SAN, CloudFront, Route53 etc., so it makes sense to use EC2 for hosting.
Amazon also launched fixed price program - Lightsail a year ago and it is much easier to set up.
I'd like to cast my vote for Heroku.
Yes you might pay slightly more for this at the beginning than Digital Ocean (which I use at my day job and really really like btw). But the opportunity to rapidly scale into new features requiring new infrastructure is second to none. Plus you get features like a staging environment for free, or very close to it.
For 'production' side project Rails deployments I traditionally use a Hobby heroku web dyno ($7 / month) and a Hobby postgres db ($9/month). Eventually I'll slap on a background resque server which needs a redis instance (Redis Cloud free to $10 a month) and a background worker ($7). Fully loaded for a basic production deploy is $33 a month and you don't have to worry about any infrastructure. PostcardPanda has been using the above strategy since it's inception in 2013 without a single hosting failure that was within Heroku's control (I have had minor outages - one from S3 and one from an old printing partner API).
I really like Google App Engine for simple stuff. They have some language libraries that are easy to use, plus they have Docker support.
AppEngine also autoscales. If your project fits the constraints of the classic version, Google takes care of nearly everything.
Also think of webfaction, managed servers or even dreamhost shared servers.
AWS lambda ftw. Once they do serverless PostgreSQL it will be gold...
Yep, Lambda is definitely my preferred location to deploy these days.
All have free tier 0 config. If I need servers, I go to:
other services:
AWS. I've had a poor experience with DO and their staff was quite unhelpful so I'm sticking to AWS. They're definitely not perfect, but if shit hits the fan I trust them a lot more than anyone I spoke to over at DO. If you don't like the AWS interface and don't need all the flexibility, they have another offer called https://amazonlightsail.com/.
I'm using https://nanobox.io together with either Digital Ocean or Vultr. My dev setup also runs on nanobox and being able to just deploy it without having to install the server is really a breeze.
Heroku with free dynos pre-revenues and then Heroku with paid dynos post-revenues ;)
Vultr. I used to use Digital Ocean but Vultr is cheaper and there is no other reason for DO to win me.
I run Aerobatic, and Indie Hacker operated static hosting service. Just "aero deploy" and your site is served from CDN nodes around the world. Also provides a plugin model for advanced functionality such as password protection for you private betas. https://www.aerobatic.com
i can suggest host on DO, with https://github.com/dokku/dokku dark sids powers
My flow is: surge.sh > digitalocean > Heroku. All my projects are RoR.
First step is a static html for a landing page to gauge interest and collect emails.
Second step is the app on a shared server on DO.
Third step, once project proved to viable, eg having recurring revenue, I move it over to Heroku.
This is a cost effective flow. Surge can be used for free. On DO I already have a fairly big droplet that can host multiple medium Rails apps. And only once a project makes money I move it to a dedicated Heroku instance.
For me, no matter how much you make, being cost aware is key for any successful entrepreneur/business (likely why I run two products in this space :)).
First step - How do you market to gauge interest?
I've build this: https://opensourceanalyzer.herokuapp.com/ in one day.
For me heroku is the best for simple tests: database for free, you can use a lot of stack, no machine to manage and update is really easy!
DigitalOcean
Pythonanywhere. Cheap, easy, great to deploy flask or django apps quickly.
Sandbox / Development / QA platform or Company website: Linode.
Production platform: Microsoft Azure.
Other platform: HANA deployment in AWS EC2.
SSL: DigiCert.
Git Repo: Bitbucket.
Other stuff and files: Google Drive
Google Cloud. Currently on free credit.
AppEngine, with Firebase sometimes. Ridiculously cheap (if you don't need to make massive stuff, and still cheaper than Amazon), gives you the chance to fully focus on the business logic and cut away all the devops nightmares.
Lately, I’ve been building mvps using glitch.com, mongolab, and aws route53 that points to an s3 bucket that forwards everything to the glitch.me endpoint. The cost is 50 cents for the route53 routing. Limits are 128mb of disk storage total for data files and source code on the glitch.me instance, 5 second ramp up time if the instance is asleep after 5 min. of inactivity, 0.5gb for the mongodb hosting. Example of such a set up is https://saucelist.com which uses Node.js and mongoose built in about 10 hours. The domain is extra on top of this ($15/year). It’s obviously not scalable, but its a trade off I make to move quickly between ideas.
Update: the route53 cost is 50 cents per month.
https://nanobox.io + Linode. Switched production app from Heroku to this configuration and reduced costs 3-4 times.
Lots of different options have already been mentioned, but for those who cannot decide my book https://www.thecloudhostinghandbook.com may be helpful.
Combination of Linode, AWS, Surge.sh
Static Hosting: Netlify.com
DNS+CDN : Cloudflare
SSL certs through Let's Encrypt
Domains on Namecheap
I've used S3+Cloudfront for my static pages this past year. As far as I can tell it's cost me nothing so far (on the free tier), with 10k views on my busiest month.
I'm looking at integrating with AWS Cognito to allow users to login+signup, it's free for the first 50 000 users and sends texts, emails for user account verification while providing a neat dashboard for user management.
I can't think of a cheaper more scaleable stack. If I need to add some dynamic functionality I can use the creds from cognito to read from Dynamodb which has a free tier of 129.8M (eventually consistent) reads per month or 50 reads per second (eventually consistent) or I can call an API gateway API backed by lambda to get the user their data which is free up to 1M calls per month then $3.50 per 1M calls thereafter and lambda is $0.20 per million with a free tier of 1M calls per month.
What I <3 the most about this is that by the time you start surpassing the free tier i.e. making more than a million calls a month, you've almost certainly started generating some revenue.
It's a great way to test ideas and have some runway while building and marketing your product.
Hi Denny,
I have sideproject listing all affordable hosting plans - check domainpromo.com
Find myself using one of the three
Digital Ocean
Netlify for static sites (has a free tier)
Heroku
Digital Ocean is great if you are comfortable with doing the server work, the costs are fixed for the most part.
Heroku is better for the long term in terms of scalability and forcing you to build your app in a scalable way... can't speak to the costs once you need to scale though.
Have used AWS before, found the costs could ramp up really fast and also it's the kitchen sink, so much stuff to figure out when most of us just need to get our app out there first.
Here lately, I've been using Surge for static front end hosting, Heroku for backend hosting and MLabs for database hosting.
All of these have free developer plans, so it's basically free for prototyping/MVPs. And if you're ready to turn it on for low traffic production, it's literally a flip of a switch and about ~$25/month.
Lately I really got into Heroku.
So much easier to launch. Even though they do have limitation and the prices are higher, but the time it takes to get going is just close to zero.
I used to be of the mind of setting my own infra on DO or AWS, and it was a great learning. But nowadays, the time is just too valuable to bother with it. I think this thinking comes with age.
Serverless framework for API (with DynamoDB) and UI on S3 or GitHub pages - keeps cost to practically £0
I've used multiple providers:
I have bootstraplogos.com on getflywheel.com - It's managed WordPress Hosting built on Digital Ocean.
After trying Google Cloud for a while, I've settled on using Digital Ocean. AWS and GC prices are eye watering. I'm sure they are cheap compared to running your own enterprise infrastructure, but they're totally unjustified for an unproven project.
I'm a big fan and proponent of DO, but some of my projects that require multiple servers start their life on Vultr as it's half the price.
Welcome to IndieHackers Denny and congratulations on nearing the launch of another side project! I think everyone at IH can particularly appreciate the effort that goes into getting a project to that stage.
I now host all my side projects on my own service, Codemason - a cloud platform for hosting apps without the hassle.
Prior to that I would just use a DigitalOcean VPS that I'd setup to suit my project
I use Codemason because I believe in it!
It's end-to-end. I don't have to worry about setting up CI/CD because it's built in and triggered with
git push. I don't have to worry (too much) about scaling because I can cluster multiple servers together and scale across them. I don't have to lose hours setting up a server and solving problems because Codemason's opinionated defaults work. It's all there ready to go.Plus, you can always run Codemason on your own servers to beat lock-in!
If you'd like to give it a try, I'd be happy to help you get setup and organise a coupon so you could get started for free
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