What is the best platform to host the Saas App? Price, convenience, speed etc.
We are creating new Saas App and wondering best platform to host our app. Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean or any others. Which is the best for price, convenience, speed?
If you're shipping a static site, nothing beats Netlify and/or Zeit.co - their free tiers are very generous and they both have serverless/lambda functionality if you need it.
I've actually started building React / Next.js apps in private sandboxes on CodeSandbox.io and then either deploying directly to Zeit.co or via GitHub commits.
It's pretty amazing to finally have a "cloud-based" IDE, CI, and Infra setup that truely works :D
My latest project on this stack: the-ux-mini-course.com
Thank you Caleb!
I also used a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet to host a free website thumbnail API that I use for my products, has been running for like 3 years without any issues. Their interface is pretty clean and they keep adding new features and improving their servers.
I find Digital Ocean wins on all of those metrics compared to the others. It only starts to lose once you're looking at more complex infrastructure requirements.
The biggest problem with DO is availability.
I really like their platform. But in the last 3 months we had at least 3 outages. Last one, our service was down for over 30 minutes 😩
Still, migrating to AWS is to big investment for us at the moment 😉
What was the cause of those outages, out of curiosity? I've had at least one production app on DO for years and never had anything like that experience!
Last time it was related to some networking migrations. They send notification, that no outages are expected 😉 => over 30 minutes outage. Moreover, if we didn't have our own monitoring system in place, we'll never know. There were no emails afterwords with explanations. 😕
Better than Heroku? I'm interested in not having to be on the hook for managing the deployment as much as possible and automated code deployment. I'm looking at stuff like Heroku or DO droplets vs. setting up a managed K8s with Rancher Rio.
Heroku beats DO on convenience for anything DO lacks a one-click installer for (though DO is slowly getting more and more into managed services and k8s). However it's not nearly as convenient as it once was and it's also become much more expensive since getting acquired.
I'd say Render beats Heroku across the board. It's even more convenient, and not quite as expensive (though obviously still more expensive than DO, or even AWS/GCP/Azure)
We don't have any complex requirements so DO can be good for us.
Heroku for ease of use, GCloud/AWS for availability and flexibility, DigitalOcean for price. Based on your priorities, I can see a use for any of the above!
It depends on your app. 99% of time you don't need ultimate speed. Generally, don't overthink it.
We use AWS, Hetzner and Contabo for various projects.
Here are some benchmarks by Rasmus Lerdorf (co-author of PHP):
https://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/61-Testing-VPS-solutions.html
One important aspect is your audience location. You want a server close to them or use a CDN.
Pricing is impossible to say without knowing your app. It changes a lot if you need more bandwidth or disk space or compute or what have you.
In general, unless you have extra time to waste, I would say go with the big guys and take hosted everything. It’s worth it even though it’s definitely more expensive, but you generally don’t need to worry about getting up in the middle of the night to fix a broken database or have a two day outage caused by a bad upgrade.
Thank you.
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