Are there developers here that also host their website/app by themselves in bare metal hosting?
Hello experts
I'm looking for methods/ideas and tips from your experience on where to host and how to host a web site which mainly be a company site with many information pages ( for SEO ) .
manuals and application forum.
Also, i appreciate knowing how do you set up the bare metal hosting ( load balancer/web servers/services)
Thanks
I'm using an Ubuntu droplet and Postgres server from DigitalOcean for my website at https://dwayne.xyz
I installed nginx, Go, and some other stuff and built and configured the site and other services from scratch. It's not a static site; all posts, comments, etc are dynamic.
I don't get a huge amount of traffic, so I'm not using any load balancers or anything else. I'm enjoying the challenge of doing everything as efficiently as I can figure out how to using the stuff I signed up for so far.
It's been good so far! I haven't had any issues with DigitalOcean and everything is running better than expected.
Thanks!
what droplet do you use ?
how did you setup your linux server , what did you installed and configured beside the web server ?
I'm using a basic / 4 GB / 2 vCPUs droplet ($20 per month). I got it to give myself some room to install a bunch of services on it, but I haven't been using anywhere near the total available RAM/CPU.
Early on, I decided to go with a Golang based stack, so I just manually installed Go and then some of the services I wanted like Fathom analytics, gitea, oragono for IRC, miniflux, etc. I wrote the web server app using mostly the built in Go standard lib.
A lot of the point of this project was for me to gain a little more experience with web server management, so lots of manual configuration/tinkering.
I use hetzner managed dedicated servers for pretty much everything. They'll run apache and security updates for you and you can book them to do WordPress updates, too. Plus you have a phone number to call if you need something quickly.
And it's still 90% cheaper than cloud for my use case. I'm doing image processing AI.
Hi. I use Hetzner for my apps, they have excellent options for everything you want at unbeatable prices, if you know what you do well and don't need much support. Then I use AWS EC2 for small websites and also AWS S3 for static files storing. I've used Digital Ocean in the past but actually I prefer AWS for serious work. I know, AWS is not technically bare metal. But EC2 is pretty close.
Recommendations. Never forget to activate a firewall and only open the ports you need. If you use Linux, an excellent option is ufw. Follow all the recommendations and never forget to install security patches, security is the priority when using your own server. So, keep your system up to date when possible.
As a web server I use Nginx, which works very well for me, for practically everything. Although I have in mind to try Caddy: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy
All the rest depends on what you do and what technology you use. Read the recommendations in the documentation for the language and frameworks you use.
Thanks!
im a Afraid to use AWS as you never know how much it will cost you in the end ..
how did you solve the unpredictable AWS pricing?
I only use it for small things, the free tier it is generally enough for me. If I have to use it for other things, they are things that I do not need all the time active, I raise instances when I need them and then I stop them when I do not need them anymore.
I would actually appreciate hearing the use case for bare-metal hosting these days. I personally can't think of any.
I assume you want to build your company site with WordPress. it makes sense, as WordPress (brochure sites) get excellent SEO. If you have a actual "web app" portion to your site, you could host that with more suitable technology (e.g. SPA).
For the company site, I highly recommend using AWS. If you want, you can deploy it yourself on a "bare metal" server. However, I recommend using AWS LightSail. What's cool about LightSail is that you can manage your instances, networking (load balancers, DNS, etc.) all from 1 interface. Also, you can start with a purpose-built instance specifically for WordPress. Hope that helps!
Did that years ago, forget the name but the provider IBM bought was excellent value..
There is so much you have to consider and setup.. do rethink if you have to actually run an active site for something like that or can generate static pages on the backend
For simple use cases a CDN can be your lb even for dynamic sites
And always think caching
Live and cold backups for your data and configuration/setup for each tech is something you should think about
Depends on sizing how advance you need to setup each layer in the tech stack...