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Can you just use a Linode? It’s $5/month. I bought a Linode VM and set up a server and database on it. Main drawback is efficiency, idk how fast a linode works once you have users. But once you have users if you can make money off them, you can migrate to AWS.
> I've ruled out hosting them locally in my home lab. Then you've also ruled out "cost-efficiently host[ing]" them as well. The most cost efficient method is using the internet connection you already have and are already paying for to also host them.
OTOH, if I needed more hardware, it'd be helpful to serve from home, because renting hardware gets expensive.
Heroku, had a free tier as well.
See https://free-for.dev/ for other possible combinations.
Put the whole thing on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet. If you end up outgrowing it, that's a great problem to have.
You could combine CloudFlare workers and/or fly.io and YugaByte or CockroachDB psql-compatible DBs free tiers. Heroku, had a free tier as well. See https://free-for.dev/ for other possible combinations.
Why don't you use GAE or Cloud run on GCP? They have a big enough free tier that you won't have to pay even up to thousand or so users. The only cost would be storage, if you're going to use SQL. But then again cheap enough. I'd suggest porting to key/value pair DBs like mongo or firestore.
> I'd suggest porting to key/value pair DBs like mongo or firestore.
Why? The data set feels pretty "relational" to me (contests have divisions, divisions have scorings and results, results have players, players have sponsors) and seems to fit SQL. To be fair though, I've not used Mongo or Firestore or a NoSQL db in general before.
The "scorings" part is the only thing that tripped me up designing a schema since it varies between divisions in a contest as well as between contests themselves, so I ended up w/ a JSONB column for scoring rubric for divisions and then in the results table there's both final_score and scoring_breakdown columns, the beakdown being another JSONB column w/ the individual category results.
I have used Google app engine since 2009 and love it: $0 charged. It powers my https://www.appblit.com site