How are you hosting your apps?
Hey Guys,
I have been trying to wrap my head around getting cheap and easy PaaS/IaaS/VPS for my side projects.
I would like to host my web apps under a single roof. My apps vary in the stack, some are in node.js, some I got built from friends using vanilla PHP, some are built on rails. Some are backed by services like Redis/RabbitMQ, while others may or may not use Docker.
Is there a way to host all of these under a single server without going crazy? Or should I stick with hosting each one of them in a separate environment (Heroku, AWS LightSail, GoDaddy CPanel) bearing the additional cost of maintaining them separately?
DigitalOcean is my goto for the past years.
Good pricing and a clean UI, although does not have a lot of tools, I think it really is ideal for Indie Hackers like us.
I'm currently using DigitalOcean as a cheap place to get apps off the ground, their UI is pretty nice.
For NodeJs and if the app can be divided into smaller webservices functions consider firebase and Azure Lambda functions.
And be little careful with GoDaddy. Especially while searching the same domain name multiple times( to avoid domain runner issues).
Ryan from Amezmo here. We should chat about your hosting and deployment needs. Amezmo can put all your apps under a single roof. You'll get a nice tabular layout of all your applications. Do you use GitHub?
For me, the most important point of hosting side-projects is low monthly cost. Reliability isn't a huge concern, and I don't mind investing more time up front. The idea is, when I go back to my "real life", I don't have huge costs weighing me down, which would tempt me to turn the project off.
Your requirements may well be different. But if yours are the same, I think you can't really do better than a Hetzner server. You can "auction" for second-hand servers here https://www.hetzner.com/sb for example $35 USD per month you can get a pretty powerful server with SSDs, 16GB+ of RAM, good multicore i7 or Xeon CPU, you can run all of your projects there no problem.
I had one server which was up for 1.6k days, I ran lots of software on it (mainly Java, some Java in Docker, multiple DBs). Never had any problems. I know others will tell you they're unreliable, but for me they worked perfectly, and even if they hadn't, it's a side-project, saving money is more important to me than reliability.
P.S. Not affiliated with Hetzner in any way, just a happy customer.
I host my PHP app using amezmo.com because:
I didn’t want to worry about setting up servers, securing the boxes and all that, so this was by far the best option.
— Jimmy
I use digitalOcean and heroku. The problem with AWS lightsail is its heavy throttling, You will have to move to EC2 sooner or latter if you use it. The problem with heroku is its pricing, but the service is great. review app feature is really helpful if you integrate it with your workflow. And finally digitalocean is the best with their pricing and impressive user interface.
It is ok to host everything under single roof as long as it is small. I used to do that. You can always split latter if you plan your apps properly.
AWS Lightsail has been my favorite place for running all sorts of different apps. For example, I have an instancs running Wordpress (on Heroku), a couple web apps on a plain old Heroku instance and some backend stuff on another.
It's easy and pretty cheap to spin up new instances, and far easier to manage things like firewall and DNS settings in Lightsail than having a bunch of EC2 instances in my experience. It's also nice to be able to put Lightsail instances on a VPC with other AWS resources like RDS.