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Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

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Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#131

Post by paulcarroty »

tjoff wrote: post #57
jedberg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still more reliable and orders of magnitude more powerful than any free service. I don't think so. AWS Lambda has a generous free tier and runs on infrastructure that has constant monitoring by professionals, spread across thousands of machines in multiple datacenters all over the world, with an SLA. Your one (or two) servers that share a single consumer internet connection (with no SLA) will never be more reliable…

Either way, relying on free services you typically need a backup plan anyway. And I hardly imagine tailoring everything for amazon can be considered cheap nor sensible.

> you typically need a backup plan anyway.

You need a backup plan for paid services too.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#132

Post by Tepix »

pythonbase wrote: post #82
simon_weber wrote: post #54

I'm something of a free tier connoisseur, and recently built an entire project with 13 forever-free tiers. It was more of a personal challenge than a business decision, but it might be a good reference for what's out there: https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-fo... Some other services not mentioned there that I've used for free recently: - humio cloud for log aggregation - nodequery for server m…

Have heard horror stories about the cheap VPS offered at LowEndTalk and similar outfits. What's your average up time? and can you recommend any service provider?

It's hit and miss. I got lucky with mine, excellent uptime and good connectivity for $8/year (this offer no longer exists).

They do lag behind in terms of security updates, however. Not something I'd use to store anything of real value in these days of SPECTRE, ROWHAMMER, ZombieLoad etc.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#133

Post by pythonbase »

simon_weber wrote: post #90
pythonbase wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have heard horror stories about the cheap VPS offered at LowEndTalk and similar outfits. What's your average up time? and can you recommend any service provider?

Pings from instances to nodequery are 98% on the low end and 99.9% on the high end. It looks like I'm at 500+ days up at impactvps.com, though I used to see cpu and disk degradations somewhat regularly with them. I haven't had any major outages in a few years of use, though one provider went bust recently after an overly-aggressive sale (alpharacks). I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The…

Thanks for sharing the insights. Do you think one should stick with $5/month droplets or hit and try the low end VPS?

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#134

Post by corobo »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #115
quickthrower2 wrote: post #104

I started this list https://gist.github.com/mcapodici/25d225848eda987071a0263b31... - I keep meaning to keep it up to date.

What netiquette have I broken here?

Best guess you said it's not been updated and on visiting it doesn't have many services listed, all of which have already been referred to in the comments elsewhere

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#135

Post by the_resistence »

jchook wrote: post #14

Linode has a $5 “nanode” VPS and scales very cheaply compared to AWS. Namecheap does free ID protect for domains. PayPal offers a good micro transaction fee rate if you plan to do small ($10 or smaller) transactions. You can use services like Algo or Streisand to set up a relatively secure auto configured Wireguard VPN. Nextcloud gives you a HIPPA compliant personal cloud for email, calendar, chat, etc. GitLab offers…

Sheesh I have been struggling with the last few steps of wireguard/algo. Gotta revisit again

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#136

Post by solidasparagus »

eropple wrote: post #47
adrianN wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deploying to lambda is literally uploading a zip.

Yes. Do you know what deploying in my local environment, for my own projects, is? It's "control-S". (Because a file watcher reloads the application.) This is acutely top-of-mind for me because I used to run a devops consultancy and I currently head devops, including release management, for a startup built heavily on AWS Lambda. I am doing my level best to reduce the loop as much as I can for the dev team. It's still…

What is it that makes this a problem? It has literally never been an issue for me.

I test the lambda body locally with a single command. Only upload a new zip when you hit the release candidate stage and that's not frequent enough for the few seconds it takes to upload to lambda to be a problem.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#137

Post by janober »

RyanShook wrote: post #89

If you publish a free Alexa Skill (easy to make a basic one) you can apply for $100 in monthly free AWS credits: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/al...

Even easier with Jovo and cross platform: https://jovo.tech

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#138

Post by Blackstone4 »

If you setup a domain and a c-corp/limited company, you can apply for $1,000 of AWS credits under the AWS Activate scheme. Careful tho because if you get the $1k, you won't be eligible for further AWS credits under an incubator worth $100k+

https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

Not sure if they still offer the $1k credits for startups outside of incubators. Here's a thread where someone else got some credits.

https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/i-just-earned-1-000-in-aw...

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#139

Post by eropple »

abnerg wrote: post #128
eropple wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

The issues highlighted in this thread around the need to develop locally against cloud resources while dealing with a litany of dependencies are one of the things we are trying to solve at Stackery. This post talks about how our team experienced much of what’s in this thread and what we built to solve it: https://www.stackery.io/blog/how-do-we-setup-a-proper-server... VS Code folks seem to be pretty excited about our…

This is, unlike most plugs, actually not bad; the tool looks neat. But I am not your audience. I already have a strong grasp of AWS offerings and tools and know exactly what I want; what I don't have is the inclination to do it for development. If I did, I have Pulumi when I need to build cloud infrastructure and I'm allergic to visual tools at pretty much every level that isn't literally making a GUI.

The problem that I have, and it is probably intractable is 1) I don't want to manage developers YOLOing dev stuff around at work and having a gigantic bill show up because a developer randomed something expensive and didn't know/didn't care to monitor it, and 2) I don't want to deal with the expense or the slowness (of deploys and redeploys, and that includes the AWS resources--ever gone "ugh, I need to burn this down and start fresh" on a dev environment in AWS? it takes forever) of using AWS for development on personal projects.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#140

Post by simon_weber »

pythonbase wrote: post #133
simon_weber wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pings from instances to nodequery are 98% on the low end and 99.9% on the high end. It looks like I'm at 500+ days up at impactvps.com, though I used to see cpu and disk degradations somewhat regularly with them. I haven't had any major outages in a few years of use, though one provider went bust recently after an overly-aggressive sale (alpharacks). I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The…

Thanks for sharing the insights. Do you think one should stick with $5/month droplets or hit and try the low end VPS?

Depends on the use case. I think the main factors are reliability and security: if it's not a crucial service and isn't handling anything sensitive, then there's no reason to pay more.
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