How do you host your projects & what's your infrastructure cost?
What hosting solutions are you using for your projects?
What's your monthly infrastructure cost for that?
I can start:
I host a few side-projects on a DigitalOcean 10$ droplet + 2$ for backups with docker containers. It works but I'm looking for something more scalable and future-proof.
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pirsch.io is hosted on Hetzner Cloud, using 4 VMs, a load balancer, a storage box, and a dedicated server for our database.
250€ for the database and roughly 50€ for the VMs plus the load balancer, adding up to about 300€ per month. We're able to process ~150 million page views a month.
Edit: 150 million is not the limit, it's just what we're currently processing. Our backend is written in Go and consumes about 1-1.5 GHz of ~7 GHz available per VM (22 GHz in total). The load balancer is the smallest instance (max 10k connections) handling about 600-800 concurrent connections at any given time.
Don't you think that using a single dedi in a single location for the database sounds like a single point of failure?
Especially in your business model, I'd consider adding a backup server at a different location - even a simple Kimsufi, or VB.
At today's prices, I'd replicate your structure in one of the major cloud providers as a low-cost backup for redundancy, at fraction of the cost of the main setup.
Just my 0.02
Absolutely! Right now we're not making enough money to justify the cost of a fallback DB server. We back up everything to a different location though. Should the database go down for whatever reason, we can bring it up fairly quickly, but there will be downtime of course.
So far there haven't been any issues with the database. The VMs are clustered and distributed, so that's out of the way.
In case of "disaster" downtime is fine, everyone has downtime, people are used with downtime, the communication is what matters and making sure it doesn't happen too often (and usually not because of you).
Sound good.
I'd get a single High-Frequency VPS with Vultr for example, and set the database there - $18/mo and it will handle quite a lot. The best thing - is they allow you to go way over the limits for short periods of time, so in case of downtime on your main server, you can definitely get a lot going on for a few hours with this one.
Either way, good luck - great looking product!
This right here! You get so far with these types of setups
Keeping it simple is a winning strategy :)
Wow. What's the use of 4 VM?
One is for Postgres mostly used for "metadata" (accounts, configuration). The other three are clustered using HashiCorp Nomad.
I wrote about it here a while back: https://pirsch.io/blog/techstack/
@m5blum wow, you've got a big project there! I see it's normality that DB costs the most...
Maybe I'll go with a similar solution, a dedicated solution for the DB and VMs for the frontend and backend...
Dedicated servers are much more cost-efficient than VMs if you need a lot of computation power. Our DB server has 32 physical cores, 64 threads, 256 GB RAM :D
Do you need that much of threads and RAM at this stage? Or it just precautions?
Yes, it actually consumes that much RAM on concurrent queries. I think I've set the limit to 16 GB per query, but it potentially uses more if required.
For most databases it's often useful to have enough RAM to store the entire database in it, including indexes. In the worst case, you should have enough RAM to hold the indexes and the memory needed for the currently running connections and queries.
Backend: AWS Lambda
Frontend: Cloudflare Pages
Database: ElephantSQL
This gives me a 0$ bill for everything.
This is how i run https://sodim.dev
Shameless self promotion for symbiosis. We offer the cheapest managed Kubernetes service by a pretty wide margin. If you're looking at something that scales well then Kubernetes might be useful sooner than you think.
Promise me that you will stay the same after beta, i will sign up with you.
I tried so many k8s which keeps increasing after beta version.
Definitely one of our top goals! It's hard to make guarantees as the price we pay fluctuate based on factors like energy prices, but we're committed to being the cheapest (and best 😇) k8s provider.
Let me know what you think of the service.
if you go from 10$ to 11$ it is fine, but when you go from 10$ to 20$ that is when i loose trust. I will try your service with my next client. :-) Good luck.
No I don't see any change like that happening any time soon. Thanks!
10$/mo for 2 vps at contabo
@maxim mhmm Contabo pricing is interesting, compared to the DigitalOcean droplets... I'm curious how it can be so cheap, are there any downsides with Contabo VPS in your opinion?
I've been using them for years, no complaints 👌. I think they're so cheap, because they expect their servers to operate for a longer lifetime. Also they save costs by having less employees and being more self-service.
Cheaper data centers and inventory. I would not use them for production environments. We're using them for things like cheap batch jobs and storing encryption keys. For example, we've had outages with them when construction workers cut a fiber cable, that wouldn't happen with providers in tier 3/tier 4 DCs.
@styren yeah, I've read some articles about it and I will stay with higher tiers :) I don't want to risk my prod app stability...
Sensible choice! With that said there are many good alternatives that can cut costs compared to the big providers. Offering a financially backed SLA (service level agreement) with a high uptime % is usually a good sign that a provider is trustworthy (I believe Contabo offers a 95% SLA that isn't financially backed, which is horrible).
Does this mean you run your own webserver and DB service in there by yourself? How do you handle availability and so on? What if the vps stops for any reason, you have to manually get everything up again?
My answer wasn't fully accurate. My DBs run on AWS RDS. The other services run in a Kubernetes Cluster on the VPS, which manages availability for me. If my VPS stops without being able to restart, I'll have to restart it manually. This setup currently works for me, but I'll switch to a Managed Kubernetes Service (prob. EKS) once I get more users.
What are you specifically looking for in terms of more scalability and future-proofing? I would favour using DO droplets for most side-projects and just scale them up as needed. Combined with some GitHub actions and nginx setup you got a pretty solid setup
@vis_ti_sen yeah, I'm using the nginx-proxy on the DO droplet and for now, it works fine, but e.g. I don't feel good about dockerized MYSQL database on this droplet. I think when it'll gets more traffic, it'll start to overload and become more of a problem...
About small side projects e.g. backend, simple reactjs apps you're right and maybe that's the way I should go: DO droplets for web apps, and some external cloud hosting for the database...
Yeah, I don't use dockerized DBs either - for my current setup, I'm running a $24 droplet and just set up Postgres 'normally' running it alongside my other apps. I wouldn't worry too much about it in the beginning, you can always use a managed DB (DO starts at $12 I believe) as you mention. If you start to run into scale/overload problems it's more of a luxury problem, and these mid-tier VPSs can handle a lot of traffic unless you're doing something crazy CPU intensive (https://mcbroken.com/, if you've ever heard about it, talked about serving 10s of thousands of request on a simple $5 dollar droplet)
Thanks for the mcbroken link, fascinating history and it gives the perspective you don't need all that top-notch technologies at the beginning.
Maybe I'll go with a droplet like you; for now it will be more than enough.
Mind if I ask you if you've had any troubles getting up and running with a droplet_like_ setup before? I'm doing a small write-up on how I've done it for my own projects and would love to hear any potential roadblocks
@vis_ti_sen I'm using a DO droplet for like 2 years+ and mostly things go smoothly, but the overload of managing everything by myself is exhausting if you're not that experienced
e.g. recently I've had a case, where I couldn't set up a blog on a subdirectory and the fix was to upgrade nginx-proxy, which wasn't updated for like 2 years.
If I were using some Cloud Hosting with a dashboard where I could set up, it'd be quicker for sure.
Azure. It's free. They have a start-up program that is free to join.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups
Fly.io free tier that includes 3gb of SQL database for marketing page.
Netlify for the actual app.
Basically free until I get traction and make money. I am more than happy to pay AFTER i earn :)
RDS on AWS seems to be too expensive at the hobby and early stage of side projects which is where I am right now. I am going to have a look at fly.io. Thanks!
You can use the AWS RDS free tier for the first year.
Is the free 3GB only for SQL or I could run also Mongo? You know if it's possible to have backups and so on?
Mongo Atlas has also free plan for 512MB darabase
I am not associated with fly.io team 😄 You can go check their website for those questions.
@emredemirel do you host your backend on Netlify? What's your experience with that?
In my current stack -which is under development- I use remix.run for the app. All my backend and database is supabase.
I host remix app on netlify and use supabase for everything else :)
@emredemirel Supabase for a database is a new thing for me. Is it really worth checking out instead of standard MySQL, or PostgreSQL instance?
Yes it is. Because supa is not just a hosted database instance. It's your postgres database, auth provider, realtime database provider, storage provider, edge functions provider. And it all comes with a Airtable alike beautiful ui for your tables so you don't have to look at terminal all the time.
crproxy.com's database is hosted on Hetzner VMs. Single primary and two secondaries in different data centers. Proxy-server clusters are hosted with different providers depending on the location.
In terms of scaling, network bandwidth is generally the limiting factor. We can scale up by adding nodes to a proxy-server cluster, or by moving to machines with faster network access. In general every cluster is vastly over-provisioned, so it's unlikely we would need to scale up any time soon.
We're not using any cloud features - database, replication, caching, etc are all built into the applications (built in Go). This makes deployment and scaling simple and reliable.
Our setup is one primary and two secondary database / api servers with Hetzner, and four proxy-server clusters around the world with three nodes each. Total cost is ~$240/month. Being in a high tax country, the tax savings means the real cost is about half that.
I use Linode and Docker to host multiple apps. Such as, blog, api, database (Postgresql and MySQL). It cost me $5 only.
@jaironlanda interesting! So you go the "standard" way and it works... Do you have any significant traffic with your projects to test how it scales?
I used render.com for https://notionhero.io, and so far, I'm pretty happy with how things are going. Deployments are fast, and render offers a lot of options and customization. I feel like I'm overpaying around 30% but oh my god, each time I had to manually bootstrap and setup DigitalOcean, I always felt demotivated after, so probably 30% is not that much. Also happy to see that Render offers replication for both DBs and web apps, so if things go well, I can scale with a press of a button.
I also second render for managing infra and CI/CD from a git push. I use render for all static sites (free) and use their services(paid, maybe 5-8/mo) if i need to.
Probably the only downside is if you have multiple microservices or backend apps, you would need to pay for each of them. In this case going with a VPS is a better option
@oleks interesting. Do you use the lowest database plan on Render? When I checked it out, it looks like I should choose at least 1 GB ~ $20/month database plan for my needs.
At the moment I'm at the cheapest DB plan, but once ( or if ;) ) my product grows I would need to move to the 20$ one.
Heroku to run production + Coralogix, OhDear, Checkly, Mailjet, Cluvio, Google Workspace, Auth0, Sentry, Stripe, Netlify. Yes, it adds up, but is worth it.
We are looking to move everything to pure EU companies and hosters, but it takes a lot more time and effort than I thought.
Yup, I still haven't found a good email service with a simple API based in Europe.
Look into Mailjet and Mailgun, both owned by Sinch (from Sweden). Super simple to use and basic enough API.
As an alternative EU pure play we are looking into SendInBlue (FR/DE-based company).
Thanks! I'm not sure if Sweden will do, but I will take a look into SendInBlue :)
I'm using sendinblue for about a year now, very simple and straight forward
Interesting: "It works but I'm looking for something more scalable and future-proof."
What do you mean by "more scalable and future-proof"?
@ropesneer I'm a Software Engineer and I don't know DevOps stuff that well. I'd like to build safe, scalable projects and don't worry that much about infrastructure as right now when I'm managing that, it takes too much time.
Ok ok, I asked to clear out any assumptions from me.
I am kind of in your situation, and I am using DigitalOcean as well.
Given that I didn’t really want to spend time configuring stuff, I opted to use DigitalOcean Ocean Apps over Droplets.
I am building my services using Go(lang), which by nature is memory-friendly (at least compared to Node.js), and for this reason I am quite comfortable running a service in the lowest plan (512mb of RAM if I am not mistaken).
Unless I manage to have a product with millions of requests per / second, I think I will be able to scale just nicely without breaking the bank.
My hosting cost me $22 per year including the domain. - https://twtjogging.xyz
It only has 1Gb RAM and 10Gb storage with 100Gb Bandwidth. I consider upgrading if my Forum reaches the maximum visitor.
@twtjogging and how you deal with the database? Do you host it directly on the same VPS?
Yes, the same provider. VPS share hosting.
I use Digital Ocean. Couple of $20 droplets and a couple of load balancers, think its around $80 a month.
@boardy interesting. And how & where do you host the database for your apps? I have a dockerized MySQL on one DO droplet and I'm not sure if that's a good solution.
At the moment the database is self hosted on the two droplets with bi-directional replication.
Database is quite small currently and not a huge amount of traffic (unfortunately) but if it grows, then likely would move it a DO hosted MySQL database instead.
cloudflare and vercel! you can almost ( most of the times ) setup something scalable with 0$
@Raiyanyahya
Yeah, I was looking for solutions like Vercel, but it looks like cloud hosting a database costs the most. How & where do you host your databases? Is it possible to use Vercel for that?
Keep in mind that you cannot use Vercel for free for commercial applications. something I learned today.
i would suggest using Upstash or Supabase for databases.
Former AWS maximalist, now hosting all my random projects on a mix of Vercel, Netlify and anything else cheap.
Also moving database oriented applications to Supabase so I can add realtime support at a later point.
@lxunos yeah I was looking at solutions like Vercel, Netlify, Render for hosting my frontend projects in React. Vercel for a nodejs backend looks fine too.
What's your experience with Supabase? I see it becoming more popular, but the pricing 25$/project seems "a lot" for a side-project, which doesn't earn money yet.
On the other hand, Render costs like 15$ for a basic fully managed database, so I don't know...
I liked it, I can agree that the offering is a little small and can be a bit pricey if you only want the database.
But supabase is much more than that, offering edge functions, auth and so forth. It can really power you entire project and thus you should split the cost over those aspects.
Although, I'm not the biggest fan of their auth since it's email based which breaks a with a few OAuth providers who don't include an email if it isn't verified (Twitter).
Thanks for the comment! I checked it and yeah, it gives more opportunities, but when I've already built an auth module and some basic stuff, it'd take unnecessary time to switch to the Supabase.
Anyway, in the future, I might give it a try!
I host engine.so everywhere it feels like.
I wish I could conglomerate it under one roof, but I've found it's just easier and better to do each part where it makes the most sense.
@spencerpauly feels like a fresh tech :) I have no experience yet with serverless, Lambdas.
Do you use one Database instance on Heroku for multiple projects? I don't know what RAM should I aim for small side-projects, probably 1 GB.
Vercel / Render / Netlify for frontend also looks promising for me, but I have to rethink using multiple solutions for different purposes...
I have one database for each project on Heroku. It's the $8 tier so one of the smallest paid tiers.
And yeah, if I weren't using the wildcard domains I'd probably host that on heroku too, but honestly I'm fine with everything at this point. I can at least remember where all my stuff is hosted and that's good enough for me.
Ive got several projects running on Amazon Lightsail (an AWS VPS) at between $10-$20/month. Also using S3, AWS Apprunner, and Lambda for another, and finally Lambda and Amplify for the last one. It stays pretty cheap all things considered.
its cheap while its small , did you do calculation on when one of your projects suddenly will get sharp spike ?
be careful
Check out Railway.app for free databases (very easy to work with), Vercel for free front-end hosting (easy), and AWS Lambda for free serverless backend (can be hard--watch tutorials).
The free tiers for these platforms are more than capable.
KINSTA is truly one of the best. I use it especially for my e-commerce STARTUP based on Wordpress. Very professional, and their infrastructure is very strong, based on Google Cloud. I highly recommend it. Pricing plan: https://kinsta.com/plans/
Thank you for the support!
Heroku paid dyno at $7 / month. So far so good :) My app is https://www.mybookshelf.digital/
I start my project with Firebase. It has very good free limits and it's very easy to setup services like realtime DB, authentication, SMS etc.
Anyone using Railway.app for hosting? Need to know is it good.
I used them earlier this year until I moved my app to AWS. I very much enjoyed how simple it was to deploy an app when committing to a Git repository, but at the time I don't believe they had any high availability or scalability options to configure my app with, so I went with AWS (more specifically with App Runner). For a while, I had my staging environment hosted with Railway.app while production was running in AWS, but a few weeks ago I also moved the staging to AWS, so as to have as much as possible a 1:1 of the infra between both of those environments.
AWS for compute like lambda, lightsail, EC2.
Postgres on Digital Ocean with automated backup.
Also render, fly.io if i don't have env setup already.
@prakashn what postgres plan do you use? $15/month for a 1 GB memory Postgres? It looks a lot higher than the standard droplet, but yeah automated backups, security etc. kinda pay that.
Manually hosting by ourself is certainly cheaper, but lot to handle initially, it is always better to go with existing DB providers, as they do much better job in case of failure. It all depends on the use case. If you are okay with loosing some data, automated backup should be cheaper.
I run everything using Laravel Vapor which deploys my app to AWS Lambda, so everything is serverless and dynamically scales. All in I spend about $140 a month to host a dev and prod instance of my site.
@zoobl $150 seems kinda high for me, a beginner :) Do you have some significant monthly traffic on your apps?
Not at the moment - but I run a link shortener so my entire stack has to dynamically scale w/ traffic. So the infrastructure for that is a bit more expensive than static resources.
I'm running madepubilc.io on a shared instance on fly.io with a single 3GB volume for image uploads and a 512MB shared DB instance.
It functions very well thanks to Elixir - great stack for scalability (and productivity).
@chrisgreg I saw a few posts about the fly.io, but for me it looks more like GCP, AWS where you need some knowledge to manage that compared to Netlify and Render.
Anyway, free plan for the start looks kinda interesting...
I'm running several k8s clusters on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for the main infrastructure https://livenessprobe.com, OCI Functions, as well as AWS Lambda.
All 8 VMs are set to OCI Burstable type to save money, main cluster is 2 nodes 4vCPU 8GB each. PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, and other services are running in the cluster, 6 other k8s clusters are smaller, with just 2vCPU and 3 GB RAM. Infrastructure provisioned with Terraform.
For 8 VMs it's about ~€150 last month.
A static website is running on Netlify (€0 for now, one accidental charge for $25), but I'm going to move it to AWS Amplify hosting or to the main k8s cluster.
Newrelic for APM monitoring - €0
Loggly for critical logs - €0
@dimm nice stack! I'm looking to set up Newrelic for my NodeJS backend too! I'm not sure about loggly yet, maybe I'll implement a self-hosted Grafana / ELK stack for centralized logs.
It depends on your logging policies and requirements. I'm sending logs to Loggly only starting from the ERROR level - it's just a few records a day.
Everything that you host yourself, you should maintain yourself :)
Forgot to mention sentry.io for React front-end monitoring - also a nice tool.
The company I work for, Render, could easily be mentioned in this conversation and I hope to see some people pop in because as the Developer Community Manager I am tuned in for feedback from users! But I have a side question for OP (or anyone else with thoughts on this), too: how do you assess an infrastructure tool in terms of how scalable and future-proof it is?
I'm using webdock.io and super happy with it for over 2 years!
Right now for static websites I put it all on github since that is free and then I use google domains to reroute to github for 12 bucks per year.
We are building out an API right now and I hope to host it on Digital Ocean.
Can you explain more about using Google Domains to reroute to github? 🤔
Sure I actually get asked this question a lot so it warranted a blog post:
https://sharifsuliman1.medium.com/how-i-host-websites-for-12-yr-c0fb0e37184c
I am running fabform.io on Digital Ocean. The running costs a peanuts!
I have used AWS and applied for "Activate" so i'm using Free credits. EC2, S3, SES are my major components.
Heroku. Costs about $14 per month with a database.
I thought the data here was interesting so decided to chart it - take a look here if you're interested: https://twitter.com/iwootten/status/1575457862654074881
For https://youthumb.net I run it using aws and https://sst.dev. The cost is around $1 every month which is only for the domain name and the dns.
Two VPSs on Contabo (5euros/month each) and a shared hosting (similar pricing). I do use some other servers, but in general only small VPSs as they give you a lot of control and performance is good (better than shared or cloud services).
This right here! You get so far with these types of setups.
Thank you for sharing.
I'm actually researching this now (plan to make a Rails CRUD app). I found that fly.io has a generous free plan (can host up to 3 servers), and that should be enough for an app/database/a background worker.
Also exploring Heroku's Hobby tiers (the $9+$7/mo for Postgres with up to 10M rows). But can't find anything on their performance.
I've deployed getserverstatus.com on AWS, the billing past month was 13 USD, I'm using ec2 on demmand.
helloivy.co is hosted with AWS. Recommend it as it's fairly cheap and extremely reliable.
I've a relatively new project so I just use Heroku at $7/mo. I think in November, I'll need to move the db to paid Dynos though, so probably $30/mo in infra costs there.
Probably will scale more Dynos as I get more users. But haven't really thought about heavily scaling/infrastructure since I've no experience in system design much (probably will consult some course or friends as I get more users but right now that's not really a huge issue for me).
AWS for me; the hosting cost account for a noticeable share of revenue but there's stability and services coming with Amazon
I was getting worried as not many people were mentioning AWS. I am about to use AWS Amplify as I'm a front end developer and no 0 about infrastructure.... but do you find it is expensive?
Something that is important to me is stability and security...
Simple Heroku plan at 7$ / month
I'm working with mostly JAMstack sites now, so Netlify free tier for all front-end hosting, and Supabase when needed. I'm migrating some personal projects to Directus, starting with Directus Cloud. So far, cost = $0.
I'm hosting Cloudgenda (www.cloudgenda.com) on AWS by using the AWS Activate program for startups.
It's an amazing opportunity that gives you credits ($5,000) for up to two years to host and use AWS services. That should provide you with enough time to set up your infrastructure, try out new services, get high availability and scalability, etc. for your application.
Azure. Free tier gets you very far
Digital Ocean droplets ($5/month) + Laravel Forge ($15/month).
Easy deployments and easy to scale. Great if your app is PHP or Laravel with a relational database.
Firebase - $0
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