14
45 Comments

Where do you host your database?

Now that there are so many options, I was wondering what the IH community is using.

Which platform do you use to host your databases?
  1. AWS
  2. GCP
  3. Azure
  4. Digital Ocean
  5. Render
  6. Firebase
  7. Supabase
  8. Self-host
Vote
posted to Icon for group Developers
Developers
on June 29, 2021
  1. 6

    Wooo nobody is using mongodb atlas

    1. 5

      I use MongoDB Atlas for https://tiip.app. Love it :)

      1. 2

        App looks really great

      2. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    2. 2

      I do, but since it's not listed I chose AWS since that's technically where the cluster is hosted.

        1. 1

          My bad. Didn't think. At least I should have added "others" on the poll.

    3. 1

      Haha, I use MongoDb Atlas for Growform. It's great - nice tools to explore performance and collections.

  2. 4

    For namy.ai I use a PostgreSQL hosted database with Heroku. Expensive but zero hassle.

    1. 2

      Yeh heroku is costlier but hassle free I feel same

    2. 2

      namy.ai looks interesting. Do you use any pre-trained models for developing such a tool or do you train them often? I believe then there would be GPU training costs that you'd incur

      1. 2

        Custom model, self trained (data is also self-scraped).

        Training for current model was about 20GPU hours, so about 12$. Totally affordable.

        I will be more ambitious with next model though :)

        But paying 100$ for dev costs I think is totally reasonable. My time is much more valuable than the negligent dev costs!

        1. 2

          I'd love to see it work with a user prompt

          1. 1

            On the roadmap! That's what the "generate your own" button will be for :P

        2. 1

          Great. Where do you get GPUs from right now? AWS?

          I can definitely agree on the dev cost / time part. Time is much more of a valuable asset than the costs associated with dev.

          1. 1

            I tried colab, but even with pro it was too limiting. Now I use Saturn Cloud, and I'm super happy with it. Incredibly easy and familiar to use, no hassle setup and fast availability.

            You do pay for this, but frankly it's only marginally more expensive than other providers - and again, considering dev time costs it's more than worth it.

    3. 1

      What kind of hassle would you expect from an AWS RDS instance compared to Heroku ?

  3. 3

    GCP + Mariadb Galera Cluster (3 master nodes) + HAProxy for load balancing

    1. 2

      Interesting. Hearing multi-master first time here :)

      a. Why?
      b. How do you take care of networking of the database servers? Do you just add security groups (firewall) to accept traffic only from the app server?

      1. 1

        a. Allow for fault-tolerant writes. Simply don't want to be missing data if I only have 1 master node and it goes down; of course there are other ways around this but I found multi-master solution works quite well.

        b. In my particular case, app servers (reverse proxy apache2 + gunicorn) are on the same intranet so beyond having different sql users / permissions depending on purpose, I don't do anything else. But Galera supports TLS if you are running in different environments where this is necessary.

  4. 3

    I would agree that databases is one of the first things to move to "managed" offerings if one can afford it, but for my side projects right now, I just host it myself. It's not as difficult as one would let you believe and you can save a lot.

    If somebody here is thinking about self-hosting, I have a full chapter on PostgreSQL and Redis in my upcoming book Deployment from Scratch including a standalone PostgreSQL demo. If anything it's good to learn how this can be done (demo includes SSL, SELinux, and can use attached storage).

    As for horizontal database scaling, I would most likely go for some of the hosted option.

    1. 2

      Hi Josef, thanks for the response and the readme gist.

      Looking forward to the book.

      A follow-up from the readme:

      "This demo exposes the database to the outside world on port 5432 with a configuration option to limit the access to a IP subnet. A local disk is used for storage."

      What if I don't know the source IP meaning if I need to open it up for multiple different sources? Is there some kind of tunnel that one can use to route traffic?

      1. 1

        I assume you'll use private networking, so you'll give one subnet of all your virtual machines/droplets. But the demo just provides a value for PostgreSQL listen_addresses directive, which takes multiple addresses and even hostnames. You just use comma (,) to separate them.

        If you leave it exposed it to the whole Internet, there is still SSL + strong passwords to protect your database access. But if you really don't know the clients beforehand, you can hide your database (close port + listen on localhost), and access it with an SSH tunnel.

        In the book I show both.

  5. 2

    i use fauna.
    no hosting, generous free tier, almost never even need a server in the middle at all/

    1. 1

      I'm starting to use fauna. I was browsing this list to see if anyone mentioned it.

  6. 2

    No "Other" option --> Heroku?

    1. 1

      my bad. Should have added "other"

  7. 2

    Depends.

    Either Firebase or AWS (relational DB or other specific use case)

  8. 2

    I run production off sqlite. I was inspired by @levelsio running NomadList off one php file with a sqlite database.

  9. 2

    inboxes.app is MongoDB which is self hosted with OVH. Planning on moving it from bare metal to a VPS so I can scale it up very easily, likely DigitalOcean.

    1. 1

      Awesome. One more follow-up. I am new to OVH. Their offering is different from other public clouds.

      What's the difference between bare metal and VPS? What are the pros and cons?

      1. 1

        So if you’re after cheap dedicated servers, kimsufi (OVH) is a great place to start. For me it makes sense as I am running an SMTP server, which many VPS providers will block. And in fact one of my other providers was blocking!

        Other than that, the main benefit is no noisy neighbours.

        For most people a VPS will do the job just fine (and hence why I’ll likely move my fb towards one while leaving the email server on its own dedicated server). The convenience of being able to scale up and down a VPS is huge, and hosts like DO also let you attach block storage (again, really neat if you’re running a large db).

  10. 2

    AWS for Postgres because it allows you to configure more things. Render.com for app services because it's just such a nice experience.

    1. 1

      You mean AWS RDS or you install Postgres on EC2?

  11. 2

    MySQL in AWS and daily backups to S3 storage

  12. 2

    I use DigitalOcean for website with higher size of database. But for normal databases (size between 20-100 MB) I use just normal hosting database from hostgator/hostinger through PhpMyAdminn.

    1. 1

      interesting.

      So how do you do a. backups b. monitoring for self-hosted version?

      1. 3

        Shared/Normal web hosting do have Automatic backup plans. Mostly I use for WordPress sites, so I use Updraftplus plugin.

  13. 1

    I'm curious, where do people "Self-host" their database?

    1. 1

      Any VPS, you are hosting a website and database in the same place.

  14. 1

    I don't even mind having sqlite3 if it's staging.

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