Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#21

Post by 999900000999 » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

I can second Hetzner, I went from spending about $40 a month to $5 a month to host two blogs.

The ID verification seems to be a bit random, I didn't have any issues with it. I would suggest looking at how much you're actually spending per month, and then think about how much time and effort moving to another provider will be.

There's a very good chance you'll end up spending so much time moving this to another provider, you could have used that time to find work opportunities or do something else worthwhile. AWS credits are pretty easy to get, assuming you haven't gotten them before.

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#22

Post by Maro » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

Sign up for a $25/mo dedicated server on OVHCloud, you can use it as a cloud devbox, host your blog, ssh-tunnel for VPN, run projects like this on it, etc. You can still call AWS APIs if you want.

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#23

Post by nottorp » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:41 PM UTC

yoaviram wrote: post #17

If you form a real nonprofit AWS will give you up to 5000 USD per year. https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/nonpr...

A Thailand nonprofit? Or only US nonprofit?

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#24

Post by amluto » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:43 PM UTC

This probably doesn’t make sense at your particular scale, but colo space can be surprisingly inexpensive, and it’s kind of fun at least until you get bored. In my local not-particularly-cheap market, a full rack with 120V/20A, 1Gbps Internet, and more cooling than you probably need costs about $400/mo. There is no particular requirement to put rack mount servers in it, although something with remote management capability is probably a good idea.

You can fit a lot of storage in there, and while you won’t get AWS-level availability or durability, the price, latency and IOPS will blow AWS out if the water, as long as you're using those IOPS and bandwidth within the same facility. Similarly, you can fit quite a bit of compute, but you’ll start needing to pay for more power if you need more than a couple servers worth.

At your scale, Hetzner is probably a better idea.

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#25

Post by randometc » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:52 PM UTC

What AWS services are you using currently and what drives your costs?

We’re a nonprofit with apps that see ~1000s of users a month, but mostly in the US. I think we see good savings using Google Cloud Run and scaling down when there’s less traffic. You could probably set up AWS Fargate similarly. Modern app frameworks start quickly so cold starts aren’t terrible. Docker containers are portable if you outgrow that kind of environment and want to shift to dedicated VMs or the other way to serverless in future. I would also look at fly.io.

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#26

Post by pryelluw » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

How many users and bandwidth do you estimate to have and use ? Do you store a lot of assets (images, video, sound)?

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#27

Post by zachlatta » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

We are a nonprofit and are in the process of switching all of our hosting over to Coolify. It's been great. We've moved 13 apps over to it so far.

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#28

Post by indigodaddy » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

What's your current resource usage? Memory/CPU/disk etc?

netcup.eu has instances that are generally about the best value you'll find anywhere. They've been around a long time and good rep.

buyvm.net while not quite as cheap as a random lowend host (keep in mind there are lots of fly-by-night lowend hosts with crazy prices (buyvm is NOT one of those)), and harder to find VM vacancies there, is super solid, fantastic rep, great network and large transfer, if you need large block device attached they have up to 10TB "slabs" you can attach to your VM for $5/TB/mo (you won't beat that pricing anywhere-- I've had one attached for a year or so and no issues very stable. And I definitely use the space). And they have a fantastic discord community and documentation/help, and are fast to respond to issues in their Discord.

But in general lowendtalk.com offers section and lowendbox are your friend (but pay close attention to provider reviews/offer comments to avoid unreliable and/or fly-by-night hosts).

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#29

Post by krab » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

akudha wrote: post #9

isoprophlex wrote: post #6

Few things beats a cheap, powerful Hetzner server, IMO. I host a LOT of stuff on my single €40/month box. 20 core, 64 gb ram, 1 TB ssd, unmetered network. They have GPU-backed servers too, obviously theyre more expensive, and not ideal for your usecase maybe. Modal is a good serverless alternative if you want to scale to zero and be able to handle spiky loads.

How smooth is the signup process? I remember reading they require passport copy etc, which makes me uncomfortable

Not in my experience (I have a EU address and payment card).

The sign up was smooth and easy.

Re: Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

#30

Post by krab » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

It depends on your needs for reliability and how many users you have.

If you don't mind being offline when doing maintenance occasionally and being down on the rare occasion when the hardware fails (like once in a few years) until you get the replacement part, then look up "server housing". You can buy a computer, either rack mounted, or tower, maybe used, and you put it into a datacenter that manages bandwidth, power and cooling.

That would be probably the cheapest option but pick something close to where you live.