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

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

#31
post #15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s because they get a lot of fraud. The alternative would be to raise their prices to compensate for theft and the cost of dealing with abuse. VPS providers like Vultr and Digital Ocean are a little more expensive but a little easier in some cases. They’re still way cheaper than big cloud.

Good experience here w/ Vultr.com (tho v lightly used). It was Derek Sivers' recommendation. https://sive.rs/ti

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

#32
If it's a simple app, consider NearlyFreeSpeech https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting

Easy, straight-forward no-frills hosting.

Could you share the app if/when it's available somewhere? I have a Buddhist monk friend moving to Thailand later this year who would be quite interested in something such as what you described.

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

#33
Cloudflare is a nice option if you can adapt your system to run there [1]. You could also run just the frontend on CF and host any APIs elsewhere. Or check these sites [2] [3] with some good reviews and comparisons of hosting providers.

Regarding spaced repetition, RemNote 1.17 an 1.18 has a bunch of AI features for summarizing PDFs and YouTube transcripts and turning that into Q&A for spaced repetition, and they also have a Chatbot interface in-app. Perhaps you could check some of what they are doing for inspiration [4].

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1: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/languages/

2: https://getdeploying.com/

3: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/

4: https://www.youtube.com/@RemNote/videos

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

#34

If it's a simple app, consider NearlyFreeSpeech https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting Easy, straight-forward no-frills hosting. Could you share the app if/when it's available somewhere? I have a Buddhist monk friend moving to Thailand later this year who would be quite interested in something such as what you described.

Do they support Python? I feel like that's going to be the most likely related stack in question..

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

#36

Port it to using SST ( https://sst.dev ) then you can more easily experiment with different cloud providers’ costs by deploying to A, B and C service. SST uses Pulumi so (per other comments) there are constructs for Hetzner among other budget hosts.

Hetzner (Pulumi) with SST example: https://github.com/prutya/next-self-hosted

Hetzner (Pulumi) example outside of SST: https://timozander.de/blog/using-pulumi-with-hcloud/

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

#37
post #23

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?

First line in the article: "Providing up to $5,000 in AWS Promotional Credit to nonprofits around the world"

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

#38

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 do you handle CI/CD-style automatic deployments with no downtime on dedicated servers? I'm looking for The Perfect (tm) solution myself.

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

#39

Though not intended for reliable, professional, and/or commercial use, Oracle Always Free⁰ is free cloud VPS (24GB RAM [ARM], 200GB, 10TB transfer, IP) and Scaleway Stardust¹ is no-additional-cost data transfer capped at 100mbps (€3.43/mo: 1GB RAM, 10GB, IP). Maybe it goes without saying, but don't mess around on the info requested when creating an account - they won't. If you're not interested in sysadmin work... we…

'Oracle Always Free' is routinely canceled after 2-3 months, however I heard some people using it for years without issues.

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

#40
What's your technology stack?

If you have a Python or Node.js or similar there are a wealth of inexpensive options. I personally really like Fly because the pricing is predictable (you effectively pay per container per month) and it's easy to get anything that runs in Docker to run there. https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ starts at $1.94/month for a 256MB container which may be enough if your backend is small and efficient.

Heroku is a bit more expensive but still a relatively cheap and very robust and proven option.

If you want to maximize the performance you can get for your money a dedicated server from Hetzner is great value, but you'll have to do a lot more management than you would with a PaaS like Fly or Heroku.

Don't spend too much time worrying about serving your own models. This is a MUCH harder problem - you need GPU allocations etc - and a whole lot more expensive. Fine-tuning models is rarely the right solution so I don't think it's worth assuming you'll be doing that. If you DO do that you can solve that hosting problem separately later on.

(Fly have a GPU product which is great but like all GPUs it's expensive compared to regular hosting.)

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