Where to host your next project - results!

Hi IndieHackers!

Some time ago I asked you how y'all are hosting your projects and I finally got to sit down and sum it up. So here it is, enjoy!

Platforms

Platforms are a very common choice. They lift some of the operational burdens and let us focus on what matters the most - developing our product.

Heroku, Netlify, Vercel and Firebase were mentioned frequently.

For static pages, Netlify and Vercel are the way to go. They both support serving dynamic content / APIs through serverless functions.

Firebase is another choice, which also has serverless functions. And if you like Docker - good news! You can just package your code as a container and have it run (serverlessly!).

More dynamic workloads are where Heroku is a great fit. Especially if you want to have background worker jobs.

Virtual machines (VMs)

Perhaps what was fairly surprising to me was that VMs are still a very popular option among Indie Hackers.

They require a little bit of upfront setup and ongoing maintenance, but it’s definitely on the cheaper end, which is definitely alluring when bootstrapping.

If you're not pushed away by the maintenance bit - DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr and Hetzner are the providers to turn to if you want to host your project dirt cheap.

Major cloud providers

Last but not least, we have the 3 major cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft's Azure.

With their rich service offering, they can fit in any category.

You can go low-level and run VMs with them or quite the contrary - and choose serverless. They also have many services tailored to particular use-cases - from transcoding video files to sythetizing text to speech.

This is both a pro as well a con – while you won’t ever need to leave a cloud provider once you choose it, there’s a good chance you’ll find a significant portion of your time navigating around their offering.

That being said, all of them offer discounts for committed usage of their VMs – something that is lacking in the offering of the other cloud providers. If you can decide how much resources you’re going to need in advance this can bring you considerable savings.

My thoughts?

Personally, I think serverless is the way to go for a bootstrapping founder as the less time you’re spending managing your services, the more time you have for growing your product.

I was surprised not to see AWS Lambda or the Serverless framework mentioned even once. I attribute that to the still infant tooling.

Platforms like Netlify, Vercel and Firebase have their tooling all sorted out, for better or worse. Although, I believe over time their advantage is going to diminish.

See the full article here:
https://marcinchmiel.com/articles/2020-08/where-to-host-your-project-as-a-solo-founder/

And here's the Twitter thread.

I hope you enjoyed it - keep hacking! ✌️

PS Let me know if I forgot about anything 😉