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Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

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Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#41

Post by cloudjacker »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #30

No one has mentioned Heroku yet. Starting at $7 they are a bit more expensive than DigitalOcean, but with that extra $2 you'll get their platform, their tooling for deploying the app, their database backups. Adding other services later on is also easy with their addons. By choosing Heroku you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars in ops costs over a course of a few months. The hosting cost may go up quickly, but…

My tech startup was just a processing server for Stripe payments, of which the static website had a single thing to buy. If its not clear all the money was made from people buying the product itself.

Heroku worked perfect for that. The $7/mo was fine.

Only reason I write this is because I wish there was a book of tech architecture case studies. What problem or business venture they were trying, what architecture they chose, how much it cost, how it worked out for them and what they wish they did.

Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#44

Post by StavrosK »

komaromy wrote: post #8
chias wrote: post #3

If "$10 / month" counts as cheap in your book, check out a Linode VPS. I've been using them for a couple years now, and I have been extremely satisfied (although I've upgraded to a beefier VPS as my project has grown in popularity). Another good VPS option is DigitalOcean, which offers a smaller (and cheaper) plan for $5 / month. There are also a lot of shared hosting providers out there that will sell you cheaper sp…

If you're considering Linode, you should read up on their history of security incidents and make sure it's a risk you're willing to take.

Not just that, I used Linode way back when and now am between a rock and a hard place. I needed 20 extra GB of space and the only viable alternative was to upgrade to a plan twice what I had, at twice the cost, just for those 20 extra GB. Meanwhile, with DO or AWS, all I had to do was add a volume for $2/mo or something.

I can't get away from Linode soon enough.

Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#45

Post by idlewords »

dougbarrett wrote: post #37
idlewords wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Heroku puts two levels of bloat between you and the hardware, and locks you into a hosting environment that becomes very expensive quickly. Eschew.

How does it lock you into their hosting environment? The apps I've made I've been able to transfer to and from Heroku without any modifications.

I was referring to cloud-style hosting. I suspect many services are over-engineered by an order of magnitude in order to be cloudy.

Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#46

Post by tjpd »

idlewords wrote: post #32
andrewl-hn wrote: post #30

No one has mentioned Heroku yet. Starting at $7 they are a bit more expensive than DigitalOcean, but with that extra $2 you'll get their platform, their tooling for deploying the app, their database backups. Adding other services later on is also easy with their addons. By choosing Heroku you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars in ops costs over a course of a few months. The hosting cost may go up quickly, but…

Using Heroku puts two levels of bloat between you and the hardware, and locks you into a hosting environment that becomes very expensive quickly. Eschew.

I disagree with this wholeheartedly and just posted why above but wanted to reiterate it here. This might just have been a throw-away comment but "bloat", lock-in & cost are red-herrings.

"Bloat" here is a virtue. Heroku removes two levels of drudgery and administration between you and the hardware. Who wants to be racking hardware? Who wants to be patching the OS? Who wants to be dealing with package vulnerabilities? None of this helps actually build the business

Lock-in is minimal, particularly if it's a self contained app and you're not using a lot of services. There are countless examples of companies who've moved off of Heroku when they've gotten big. Plus there's also lock-in using EC2, S3, AWS. There's lock-in of some level regardless where you run your stuff.

Future cost is also really, very very low because P(success) is, sadly, super low.

Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#47

Post by bobfunk »

pimterry wrote: post #15

If you're talking about hosting your startup's landing page, stick with Github Pages: https://pages.github.com/ . Free, super quick & easy, with custom domains to boot. Personally, for almost any product I start here. Even if you do need server-side infrastructure for the product, hosting all your marketing pages on GH pages is probably the right choice - they're going to be better at reliably hosting and serving sta…

Have a look at netlify (https://www.netlify.com). Free plan as well, but we include https, support any build tool (not just jekyll), have integrated CDN support, deploy preview (get a unique URL for each pull request) and much, much more.

Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#48

Post by idlewords »

tjpd wrote: post #46
idlewords wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Heroku puts two levels of bloat between you and the hardware, and locks you into a hosting environment that becomes very expensive quickly. Eschew.

I disagree with this wholeheartedly and just posted why above but wanted to reiterate it here. This might just have been a throw-away comment but "bloat", lock-in & cost are red-herrings. "Bloat" here is a virtue. Heroku removes two levels of drudgery and administration between you and the hardware. Who wants to be racking hardware? Who wants to be patching the OS? Who wants to be dealing with package vulnerabilities…

Built in to your comment is the assumption that you're trying to grow your business big or die.

If you're working in a niche market, costs are important and keeping them low can be the difference between having an independent livelihood and failure.

Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#49

Post by boulos »

As people asked, what do you need "today" (host website apparently) and what do you need "tomorrow"? If you just need a simple static-ish web app, and everything else is your offline iOS game that's pretty different from building say a Snapchat competitor.

Full disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, but it's unclear you need a cloud provider.

Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?

#50

Post by tjpd »

idlewords wrote: post #48
tjpd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this wholeheartedly and just posted why above but wanted to reiterate it here. This might just have been a throw-away comment but "bloat", lock-in & cost are red-herrings. "Bloat" here is a virtue. Heroku removes two levels of drudgery and administration between you and the hardware. Who wants to be racking hardware? Who wants to be patching the OS? Who wants to be dealing with package vulnerabilities…

Built in to your comment is the assumption that you're trying to grow your business big or die. If you're working in a niche market, costs are important and keeping them low can be the difference between having an independent livelihood and failure.

No it's not, it's really not. In fact I think in a niche market then it's often even more true.

If you're building in a niche then (almost by definition) you're not going to need a lot of infrastructure. There won't be millions of customers and they (usually) won't need tons of infrastructure.

I think the only case is where you're building a business like Pinboard :) Where the CLTV is relatively low but the the bandwidth, storage & compute is relatively high.

Regardless of the market you're in though, if you want to build an independent livelihood or a lifestyle business typically infrastructure costs still shouldn't be a factor.

A good livelihood might be $50k/yr say or $4k/mo roughly. The difference between $5/mo and $500/mo in hosting costs isn't what determines success or failure. It's whether or not you've built, marketed and sold an app to 5 or 500 customers.

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