Can you give us an idea of what your site is built in? Personally I have a side project I am working on which I am just hosting on the free allocation of AWS. Even if it weren't in the free tier, it would be extremely inexpensive. With that, I have a lot of experience deploying to AWS and I have scripted most of the process (in fact, other than some monitoring, at this point, the deployment process is entirely automated). This would work for just about any architecture. But, the difficulty of setup will cause your mileage to vary a bit.
Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
71–80 of 101 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#72This 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…
Honest question, what does Heroku offer over Elastic Beanstalk other than being more expensive? I switched to EB and it seems more flexible and a lot cheaper, and I haven't wasted hours on admin.
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#73This 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…
Honest question, what does Heroku offer over Elastic Beanstalk other than being more expensive? I switched to EB and it seems more flexible and a lot cheaper, and I haven't wasted hours on admin.
> Honest question, what does Heroku offer over Elastic Beanstalk other than being more expensive? I switched to EB and it seems more flexible and a lot cheaper, and I haven't wasted hours on admin.
I said "something like Heroku" and Elastic Beanstalk is similar.
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#74Don'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.
Sometimes the best question is the simplest one. I agree the original has a lot of scope of improvements but I prefer the debate and the range of answers which wouldn't have been the case if the original question was more specific.
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bandw…
I agree with your overall sentiment I think, but there are many side gigs where $5 vs $500 a month is the difference between viable and not viable. Sometimes it's the difference between sticking with an idea long enough to turn it into something viable; something that's bleeding you $500/mo won't have as long a life as something that's only $5 or $25/mo while you're figuring out if there's something worthwhile or not.
A niche market cuts both ways. Sometimes you don't need to worry about scale, but you also can't bet on large numbers of customers coming to cover up inefficient choices.
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#76As someone who wasted time and money with AWS I'd say start with something simple like DigitalOcean and worry about problems as you face them.
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#77No 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 $7/mo was fine. Only reason I write this is because I wish there was a book of tech architecture case studies. What problem or business venture they were trying, what architecture they…
What kind of DB did you have? As I recall, the 7$ offer only supported 10000 rows of PostgreSQL?
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#78Reading a lot of these comments make me think that everyone on HN is a cynic of the Oscar Wilde/Lady Windermere variety: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" [1]. IMHO you should go with Heroku and ignore anyone who's suggesting dedicated servers, VPSes, AWS, Docker or containers. Every moment you spend maintaining a server or doing devops is wasted because it's time not spent building o…
I think this logic applies to side projects too. Unless the infrastructure stuff is of interest in itself, it is better to let someone else take that pain away. The beauty being that to do so for a side project is free or almost free.
> But if you think that a decent developer is worth at least $50/hr and it might take you an 1hr to set up and 1hr/yr to manage a server (e.g. apply patches, update security) then you're better off not spending those 2hrs and paying an extra $100 hosting your app.
It doesn't change your point (it enhances it actually) but I'd say you need the 1hr/1hr for heroku (to learn their way of doing things etc.) and 24h/8h for the self-hosted, based on my experiences. But I am not a linux whizz.
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#79This 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…
Honest question, what does Heroku offer over Elastic Beanstalk other than being more expensive? I switched to EB and it seems more flexible and a lot cheaper, and I haven't wasted hours on admin.
ElasticBeanstalk is a lot more flexible, since it's basically just a wrapper around existing AWS services.
Re: Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
#80It looks like you're confusing your startup (which is a company) with your web site.