Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#1

Post by aosaigh » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 10:49 AM UTC

I'm a solo dev working on both my own apps and a product as part of a small team. I'm interested to hear how others are running their apps?

- Self hosted on a VPS? - Managed infrastructure like AWS, Fly, Render, Digital Ocean App Platform, GCP? - Full-stack platform like Vercel, Firebase, Supabase?

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#2

Post by eru2 » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:06 AM UTC

Currently using heroku for a backend server for an app I'm working on, in the past I've played with a lot of different options, but most of them are too complicated and expensive if you don't actually have paying users.

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#3

Post by anso_cc » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:30 AM UTC

1GB RAM DigitalOcean VPS

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#4

Post by codehooks » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 12:07 PM UTC

Netlify for front-end and codehooks.io for the backend.

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#5

Post by TobbenTM » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 12:13 PM UTC

Fully managed so I can spend my time on actually building features. In my case, AWS is my go to cloud, and even with a couple of thousand users, Lambda for compute, DynamoDB for database and SNS+SQS for eventing is costing me less than 5€ per month. Yes, there are risks with serverless if you get DDOSed or whatever, but it’s a risk I’m fine with, and can mitigate with gateways in front if necessary. And Lambdas are not locking me in to AWS since I’m running “full” ASP.Net apps in them, so hosting them on actual compute platforms is an easy switch.

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#6

Post by nicbou » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 12:21 PM UTC

Docker on a DigitalOcean VPS. I've never been a fan of managed stuff, but then again I'm mostly coding for fun, not because it's the best use of my time.

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#7

Post by pestatije » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 12:41 PM UTC

im considering Railway due to not requiring credit card, but have not decided yet so cannot tell if its good or not

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#8

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 1:05 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#9

Post by aosaigh » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 1:06 PM UTC

TobbenTM wrote: post #5

Fully managed so I can spend my time on actually building features. In my case, AWS is my go to cloud, and even with a couple of thousand users, Lambda for compute, DynamoDB for database and SNS+SQS for eventing is costing me less than 5€ per month. Yes, there are risks with serverless if you get DDOSed or whatever, but it’s a risk I’m fine with, and can mitigate with gateways in front if necessary. And Lambdas are n…

Interesting. Did you migrate to a serverless architecture or was your app serverless from the start?

Re: Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

#10

Post by romanhn » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 1:12 PM UTC

TobbenTM wrote: post #5

Fully managed so I can spend my time on actually building features. In my case, AWS is my go to cloud, and even with a couple of thousand users, Lambda for compute, DynamoDB for database and SNS+SQS for eventing is costing me less than 5€ per month. Yes, there are risks with serverless if you get DDOSed or whatever, but it’s a risk I’m fine with, and can mitigate with gateways in front if necessary. And Lambdas are n…

Very similar tech stack here, with all the same motivations. Biggest differences are I'm using RDS for the database and have a slightly different approach for serverless compute. I started out with Lambda, but the cold start times were bugging me so I moved production hosting to App Runner, which is the next best thing (eliminates cold start without breaking the wallet). Kept staging environment on Lambda. Also using the "fat lambda" approach with ASP.NET apps, so no lock-in here. Spending about $35/mo total - RDS is the biggest contributor, then App Runner and other small things.

I also have an SSR app for the homepage which required some dynamic functionality. Basic Node app hosted in a Cloudflare worker essentially for free, hitting the App Runner hosted API for data.