Conveniently deploying and hosting your full-stack apps shouldn’t cost a fortune
Hosting multiple apps on a PaaS like Heroku can quickly add up in costs. Not to mention the hidden cost of scaling. If one of your apps starts gaining traction, the steep pricing ladder will quickly empty your wallet 💸
A VPS instance is a lot cheaper, but having to configure and maintain a server is a huge time sink. As a lone indie hacker like yourself, you’d much rather work on your project and focus on your customers.
What you really want is cheaper hosting AND the convenience of a PaaS. Imagine a setup that saves you money, requires very little effort to get started and gives you an easy-to-deploy endpoint for your apps ✨
The Server Template for Busy Hackers does the boring work of configuring a server for you. You get out-of-the-box:
- Secure server ⛑
- Easy one-line deployments 👩🏻💻
- Auto-renewed SSL certificates 🔒
- Automated deployments 💫
You’ll be able to setup something that would’ve normally taken you days or weeks, into something you can do while drinking coffee ☕️
I think most the time sink around hosting and deployment that you mention is self-imposed.
I used a VPS way back before I could really code, just dragging updated WP theme files, styles etc into an FTP app to send them to the server. I have a more complex setup now, but spend almost zero time on it (maybe 10 or 20 minutes this entire year).
The problem is people are pouring huge amounts of time into containerization and orchestration, horizontal scaling and things they don't currently and may never need.
Totally agree. Most folks don't need any of those things when they're starting out.
There's also a group of people that aren't comfortable with Linux and for which servers are daunting to begin with. They don't know how to... secure a server, generate SSL certificates, deploy their apps, host multiple apps on a single box, setup auto-deployments, etc.
Basically all of the conveniences a PaaS offers over IaaS. You can waste days reading documentation and trying to learn how all this stuff works.
My friend who scaled a nutrition info site to 50k MRR on an old school shared host with phpmyadmin is one of them.
Like me, he deployed by dragging files into a visual FTP client that sent them to the server (overwriting the previous versions of the same files in the process). Even the PaaS offerings you mention would have been more daunting for either of us in the early days.
But it turned out that auto-deployments really weren't that crucial of a feature. And being solo, not even source control was that big of a deal early on. YMMV.
I see Render doing an amazing work on this front. $7 for a server, $7 for a DB. I think you should take those offers into consideration as wlel.
Although I haven't used it myself, I've heard great things about Render.
It does however fall into the PaaS category, similar to Heroku. At Render you pay $25/mo for 2GB RAM and 1 vCPU. DigitalOcean gives you the same specs for $10/mo. That's an extra $180 per year you get to keep.
Plus you can host as many apps as you can fit on one server, without going up in price. Render and Heroku charge you per application. With several fullstack apps, whether that's for your portfolio or SaaS side project, it adds up.
I wouldn't want to serve an audience that makes a fuss about $180/year...