Best hosting service for your projects

I always go for a VPS for anything serious. Works in the past, works today and will always work in the future. Now I'm using Hetzner[1]. Amazing price for what you get. But it doesn't really matter what you choose as long as they're reliable.

I've used others like Heroku, AWS, Netlify, Github pages, Vercel and many more. Depending on your project, they might be faster to bootstrap. But over time, things will change and you'll spend more time learning and maintaining those than a traditional VPS/server.

I don't know how many times I've had to sacrifice a weekend to fix whatever shenanigans Heroku, AWS or whatever host are up to on that particular day.

There are so many new and shiny platforms nowadays. My recommendation is to treat them like Javascript frameworks. Most will be outdated in a year or two. It's fine for exploration projects (those that doesn't matter even if they die). Otherwise, save your future self the stress and go with a VPS.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/

I have a Bash script that can set up a VM for my project on any provider with cheap VM :).

A lot of people underestimate how far can you go with a beefy VM.

One of the most expensive things is often the database and that's why I included a database provisioning demo in my book Deployment from Scratch.

My go to is Railway (https://railway.app) at the moment. I use vercel for any javascript front ends, but railway runs my databases and containerised backend stuff.

If you'd like to support your fellow Indie Hackers, give Adaptable.io a try. We'd be happy to help you out with any questions and to provide an IH discount for the higher tiers. :)

I've used heroku, its very simple and fast to configure, and GKE which requires more technical knowledge but allows you a more personalized config (flexible) and better scalability than heroku.

It depends on the project for me.

• Ideally, I'd use GitHub Pages for any static site that I'd want to deploy. This could be a landing page.
• If I need to deploy any server code, I typically try to start on fly.io because of it's ridiculous free tier. Although, if you need more complicated infrastructure (message queues, ElasticSearch, etc), it's slightly more complicated to deploy there. I tend to use server language (Rust, Kotlin, or Go) + SSR + Postgres when my projects are first starting out. I tend to try to avoid introducing complicated architecture until someone is paying me.
• If a project is making money, I'll usually transition to DigitalOcean. App Platform if I don't need any specialized infrastructure or just regular VPCs if I do. My tendency is to believe that PaaS is basically hiring a devops engineer for like $2/month + server. Your #1 focus should be delivering value to your customers, not managing VPCs.
• I try to avoid big cloud providers because their products tend to be more directed at larger companies who don't care about fluctuations in cloud spend (or tend not to care about cloud spend at all) and need to scale to a size that I believe most indie hackers won't need to :)

AWS with the existing provisioning tooling I'm used to, from working in the industry for a long time. I've had too many projects that I hacked together and failed to maintain unless it's versioned and tracked somewhere. I never want to manage a random server ever, ever, again. Everything must be ephemeral (auto scaling groups even if min size=1, lambda, ECS, etc.) and rebuildable. It makes security and maintenance sooo much easier long term. Personal rule, you do you. :)

Doing it this way, if you are used to it, does not cost very much in terms of labour. I'd rather spend more money and save more time early on, all else being equal.

I also try to build things in Docker so they are portable, but the pricing for lambda is attractive for early stage stuff... I hate paying for running services without much (or literally zero) traffic. So that'll get optimized soon when I do another pass on infra.

Friebase from google works good for us :)

We use vercel + aws for frontend and backend respectively.

Depends on what you're looking for. Personally, I use OVH. Good pricing, unmetered bandwidth, solid reputation.

AWS

Cloudflare pages for static stuff. Fly.io for backend and database. And linode for object storage.

well, that depends of your stack, but I find Vercel the best out there. Easy, fast and reliable

Vercel

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I'd suggest Stackless if you're building a TypeScript/JS front end and need off-browser datastores and/or secure backend service hosting. Or if you want any sort of real-time chat or real-time database object observability.

The data engine (RocksDb) is hosted in-proc with the TS container so it's very, very fast compared to traditional NoSQL-like cloud-native databases like Firebase/Supabase. Not including network overhead, most backend requests complete in 100μs.

Docs/DevConsole: https://stackless.dev
GitHub: https://github.com/stackless-platform
Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/warpdrive-tech

I use netlify and firebase. If you are looking for static hosting firebase is probably cheapest

The default I use for side projects is Firebase. Unfortunately haven't had the problem of needing to think about scaling costs yet!

Hi @stolenng 👋

I've personally used:

• Render (still in the process of trying this out, but I know some indiehackers are not too keen on the results)
• Heroku on Edith&Nous (works fine as long as you don't need to scale too much, but I feel the log management is horrible)
• Firebase Hosting
• GKE/GCR (really loved those but it's quite a pain to configure and it's definitely more technical than Heroku/Render)

I don't know the kind of project you're working on, but it's rare scaling becomes an issue before you reach the money point where you actually just can buy it 😄