Hey Indie Hackers! Where do you host your SaaS applications?

Similar to DigitalOcean, I use Vultr

I personally advise either becoming technical by reading into hosting and servers or hiring someone who is technical

Heroku

I've used DigitalOcean very happily for various projects for several years. I would recommend them highly!

I use linode, but now that digital ocean has the same specs, I’d switch. VPS for sure, AWS is super complex and indie hackers don’t need scale, they need speed as in development speed

If you're interested in getting off the ground quickly while still positioning yourself to scale, I'd recommend Heroku. If you're interested in learning a bunch of things and saving on hosting costs, I'd recommend setting up a Dokku server on a rented box.

I personally use Hetzner -- they generally offer servers at ~60% of the price of DO and peers per GB of memory (depending on exchange rates). A major downside is the only locations they offer are in Germany, so consider the implications of that on latency first.

I'd also suggest looking into Dokku. It's open source (free) and it's easy to set up a Dokku server on a Linux box (Hetzner or otherwise). Once set up, you have a barebones Heroku-like server on the cheap -- perfect for sharing prototypes, MVPs, and apps with minimal-to-moderate volume.

We use Heroku, and while moving off of it comes up every now and them, the cost of Heroku versus staff to maintain the infrastructure keeps us on Heroku.

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Just to add... all of these options AWS, DigitalOcean and GCP are going to be complicated for a non-technical person.

If you're actively developing this chat bot yourself I'd suggest hitting up some tutorials or even using a Platform-as-a-Service such as now.sh to host your app (can get costly should you get popular).

If you're not the developer then I'd seek out a technical person to guide you into what to do about deployment.

If anything deployment shouldn't be the focus if you don't have the product running locally to understand the technical needs.

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I use google app engine , i have the peace of mind knowing the system will autoscale to my needs , and i don't need to worry about maintaining a server OS

Google Cloud 🤘

I'm more of a front-end developer (not extremely knowledgable about back-end yet), and I went with Heroku after fighting with AWS for a few days. Heroku was much easier to get the hang of, and there are tons of YouTube tutorials on using it, too.

On top of Heroku, I use Amazon's S3 for file storage.

If you're not technical and your goal is to prove your concept I'd recommend disregarding the cost and going for something like Heroku or now.sh because it's very likely to save you a lot of time. It might cost you a bit more but I would not underestimate the hidden cost of learning / debugging how to deploy to lower-level type of PaaS or IaaS.

You can always switch later to something cheaper to run but you'll definitely have to spend more time in documentation-land. And while AWS is great when you know it, it's far from being the most intuitive tool out there and it's really easy to get it wrong[1].

The free tiers on Heroku and now.sh are limited but that should be more than enough to build a proof-of-concept.

In my own case I'm using a mix of AWS S3 for the frontend, Netlify for static websites and Heroku for the backend. I don't want to put the backend on AWS because my focus at the moment is building a big enough user base that Heroku costs become a (good) problem.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/05/unsecured_s3_bucket_discovery_tools/

GCP is much cheaper than AWS, and I've found the technology to be more mature.

Both providers will throw money at you for your first year too. You just have to ask.

DigitalOcean is certainly usable in production, and is a great provider, but their global reach and catalog of services are't nearly as good as AWS and GCP, or as mature. Consider where - geographically speaking - you want to host your chat bot as much as with whom.

Some have recommended Heroku. I have limited experience with the platform but it is designed for people in your situation. That being said, I just take one look at their PostgreSQL DB options and I cringe hard at how expensive it is... but then you're non-technical, so on the flipside it isn't expensive, it's a must because you can't do it your self anyway.

Another option is hiring someone (like me) to build out a simple platform to host your application on top of a cloud provider like GCP, AWS, or DO. It shouldn't be too much work, or too expensive, to write out an Ansible Role for your application and its dependencies; a Terraform module for the infrastructure side of it; and finally having everything in a TravisCI private account doing CI/CD for you.

From there you can build on top of that solution as you expand.

Get in touch if you need something along those lines.

It depends on the security requirements involved. For more security sensitive apps, AWS. For less security-stringent apps, Digital Ocean or Linode should do.

The reason I differentiate between the two is primarily to do with the level of sandboxing I can achieve with AWS vs others. Now I may be unaware of other options (which is why I end up paying premium). If someone knows a cheaper way, let me know :)

Specifically, it's to do with PCI compliance.

I've been using Digital Ocean for some time now but will likely to migrate to Kubernetes soon.

My first two products were hosted on Azure. I personally wouldn't recommend it for begginers.

Plan to move to Heroku. Perfect for early beginners and the price tiers are not terrible.

Netlify for front-end for my site. They've had some bad outages lately due to DDoS, so I am not sure if I will stick with them. AWS for back-end using 100% Lambda functions.

I've had a Chat bot hosted on Scaleway, it was fairly cheap so it was a good for the start.

Moving to cloud functions with static hosting, had to move back from azure and GCS to AWS due to some limitations unfortunatly. The reason for this is that no side project would have to die anymore due to low popularity, if it does not get used it does not cost anything.

I personally use DigitalOcean but I'm technical so I don't have an issue configuring the servers, database, etc, myself.

In terms of costs, DigitalOcean is cheaper than the 2 others for Virtual Server with similar specs with the cheapest droplet (Server) being 5$ US per month. Depending on the resources needed by your app, maybe more servers or bigger servers could be required. It is hard to say without knowing the stack.

That being said, depending on your objective and your projected growth (new features, new market, etc), you may be better served with AWS or Google Cloud.

If you are not too comfortable with the hosting platform, I would suggest to get help to deploy your app. I think many of us could help you with this.

Feel free to ping me if you need guidance to deploy.

Hi
Depends on what kind of availability you need. I would advice getting a technical resource.

For hosting I would recommend a paas solution such as:
Heroku
now.sh
aws elastic beanstalk
azure web sites

Best regards
-Andreas

1.Digital Ocean
2. Google Cloud - you will get $300 free credits. It is more than enough to run your servers and experiment anything new.

I'm happy with digital ocean as well.

This comment was deleted 6 years ago