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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?

#51

Post by andrewl-hn »

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 wouldn't say it locks you. All the configuration is done via env variables, so your app code will have no Heroku-specific parts at all. Since it's a very known and popular platform there are many resources online about how to migrate away. If I were given a task to migrate between hosting providers I would rather deal with Heroku apps than anything custom and bespoke on top of DO, Linode, or AWS: heroku apps are just so predictable.

Besides, not every app needs big computing power, and many businesses can thrive on Heroku for a long time. An employee of ProductHunt mentioned on a podcast that they ran their website on 3 Performance L dynos at in 2015. That's $1500 plus some extra for the database and other services they may be using (say $3k in total). That's one of the popular websites out there, and that's a pretty good indication of an upper bound of the infrastructure cost on Heroku for a popular product. Most will never exceed the $200-300 a month.

Is $3k a big sum? Yes, it's noticeable. Will you end up spending more on hosting plus the ops work that needs to be done over time for a similar app to run and grow? Likely.

EDIT: spelling

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

#52

Post by seanwilson »

This highly depends on if your site is dynamic or static. If static, I would go with GitHub Pages or Netlify as they're free/cheap and easy to use. Static sites with this kind of hosting is also great in that they require practically zero maintenance.

If you have to run a dynamic site (less potential headaches if you avoid this), I would try to use something like Heroku. It's easily one of the simplest way to host a robust site that needs to scale without having to spend much time on admin and DevOps.

For the people recommending a VPS, DigitalOcean etc., you're talking about using a huge amount of your own time to make such a setup as robust, easy to use and low maintenance as Heroku. What about backups? Scripting server creation? Adding a load balancer and more servers? Security updates? Server security?

The more parts and scripts you have to put together yourself, the more things that can go wrong and the more time of yours it's going to consume. If you consider how much your own time is worth and how important your startup is to you, trying to save anything in the realm of $10 a month on a core part of your startup doesn't make any sense if this is going to cost you multiple hours of time a month.

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

#53

Post by erikb »

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.

How can you talk about lock-in without more argumentation when the person just above your response gave good reasons why Heroku is not a lock-in?

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

#54

Post by erikb »

Don't trust anybody who doesn't start with "it depends". For nothing in this world there is one perfect answer. Context means a lot. What have you coded? Why do you think you are done if it is not running anywhere (I would say you are 20% done if it runs on your laptop)? How many people need to use it to be viable (e.g. a diary service needs only one user who writes texts for himself, a shop needs at least make its hosting and transportation fees, a social network needs thousands of people before it can even start to be successful)?

Good general advice is this: The simplest solution is often the best, but in some cases that means taking your old desktop pc, install ubuntu, configure your router to publicly share http and https from that computer. In other cases it means using a toolset like Heroku.

Please don't be mad about this, but the way you phrase your question it is very very likely you have so little skill that you don't even know how little. Please consider to pay a freelancer to support you. He likely has more skill and has experienced more "this can never happen in real life" F-Ups than you, and therefore can handle a lot.

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

#55

Post by imaginenore »

sixhobbits wrote: post #12
imaginenore wrote: post #2

Cheap: browse through the listings on lowendbox.com, you will find some amazing deals for both VPS and dedicated servers. Reliable: AWS / Rackspace / DigitalOcean / Google cloud / basically any famous one. When you're starting, it's probably better to rent a cheap VPS server. If you start growing fast, you can always move to the cloud. But modern cheap VPSs are quite powerful. I have 7 websites running on one that co…

Curious, what's your definition of "the cloud"? Under mine, running off a cheap vps is very representative of "running in the cloud". What would the "move to the cloud" entail? Do you mean using more services such as lambda, S3, or a database as a service platform as opposed to doing this "manually" by installing software on a clean OS? For me: buying a rack/dedicated machine is the "traditional" (though increasingly…

To me the cloud means you can start an instance with an API call.

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

#56

Post by coupdejarnac »

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but Redhat's Openshift provides an alternative to Heroku. I've used it for a few years and been happy with it. They have a startup program that gives you access to a paid tier for a year. I've used Openshift to host Node and Flask apps.

Edit: a bunch of downvotes for trying to be helpful, how nice.

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

#57

Post by Tiquor »

idlewords wrote: post #45
dougbarrett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mostly just AWS apps.

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

#58

Post by boulos »

ing33k wrote: post #24

you should check out free tier offered by Amazon https://aws.amazon.com/free/ Also do apply for things like BizSpark https://bizspark.microsoft.com/ if you have a static marketing page, you can also host it for free ( almost ? ) on https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/

Yes, for a site that can just be hosted on the Firebase free tier (https://firebase.google.com/pricing/) you can go a long way (the same is true of the App Engine free tier). The OP stated they had already written something though, so my guess is that rewriting to Firebase wouldn't work (if it's just a SPA front-end app in Javascript, fine, but if there's any backend a rewrite seems more hassle than it's worth).

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

#59

Post by solipsism »

erikb wrote: post #54

Don't trust anybody who doesn't start with "it depends". For nothing in this world there is one perfect answer. Context means a lot. What have you coded? Why do you think you are done if it is not running anywhere (I would say you are 20% done if it runs on your laptop)? How many people need to use it to be viable (e.g. a diary service needs only one user who writes texts for himself, a shop needs at least make its h…

"skill"? That's bullshit, you can't tell anything about skill from a person's poorly phrased question. Especially since that person's primary language might not be English.

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

#60

Post by jhylau »

For any non-static website - Heroku FOR SURE. It's not even a question - I have two companies that both run on Heroku - both startups are profitable and both will remain on Heroku for the next couple of years. (https://www.switchup.org and https://www.trycarriage.com) - I know massive scale billion dollar companies that are on Heroku (e.g. Deliveroo, Macy's)

The cost/benefit analysis is ALWAYS positive in favor of Heroku until you hit super massive scale (minimum 2-3 years out for most startups, if ever). It's super easy to use. Their feature set is increasing monthly and they can handle a lot of different types of setups.

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