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DigitalOcean App Platform

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Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#161

Post by donmcronald »

earthboundkid wrote: post #132
user5994461 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big players have separate charges for bandwidth and disk and other hidden stuff. They are way more expensive than Digital Ocean / OVH all inclusive. Worse, the costs is unpredictable which makes them a no go for a side project, I can't risk accidentally getting a $1000 bill. As a real world example, I run a personal blog. If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featur…

Can HN really deliver enough traffic to a static site to cost a significant amount? I've had mildly popular posts on HN for my Netlify blog (John Carmack tweeted about it!) and not had to pay for bandwidth.

No. I don't think so.

The concern for me is a lack of hard limit on spending on GCP, Azure, and AWS. If I screw up and allocate a bunch of resources unintentionally, I'm left holding the bill. That's a terrible setup for PaaS because all programming involves mistakes eventually, especially for new users learning the system.

Granted, there are likely limits on accounts, but those are to protect the services from fraud, no to protect the user from overspending. The limits aren't well defined and it's not something you can rely on because MS might consider $10k / month a small account while it's a ton of money for me.

Azure customers have been asking for hard limits on spending for 8 [1] years with radio silence for the last 5.

There's a difference in goals I guess. If I spend more than expected I WANT things to break. Microsoft, Google, and Azure want me to spend unlimited amounts of money, even if I don't have it. At least AWS can be set up using a prepaid credit card so if I screw up they have to call me to collect their money and I negotiate.

1. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/...

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#162

Post by SahAssar »

user5994461 wrote: post #86
bravura wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but AWS doesn't allow you to do hard limits. I was creating a public S3 bucket today and wanted there to be a hard limit, so I couldn't get slapped with a huge AWS bill. Looking at the docs, it appears I can get alerts but not set a hard limit on my billing.

AWS allow to set limits on autoscaling groups, ECS, EKS. All the things with autoscaling really. If you're worried about billing, S3 is not a great choice. S3 is precisely unlimited storage for enterprise.

Saying that something that is billed based on usage is not also able to have it's usage capped seems weird.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#163

Post by withinboredom »

phildougherty wrote: post #26
mitch-snipline wrote: post #20

I got quite excited at being able to stick my static sites on DO for free, but notice on this page[1] that only the first three are free, then it's $3/m/site. Perhaps I've been spoiled by services like Netlify. I'd be interested to know what the benefits are of using DO's service over free alternatives. [1] https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8

Thanks, that is valuable feedback. We definitely recognize that there are other options out there that offer unlimited static sites. We feel that the additional features and capabilities offered by the platform including running scaled our dynamic workloads, workers, jobs, and databases - at a price point that is very competitive will provide you with value to make up for it - having these features just results in a…

It seems rather silly to limit the number of free sites unless you somehow restrict the number of accounts people can open. Also, by restricting, you lose the analytics to see how people are using the service when, not if, people start creating multiple accounts.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#164

Post by SahAssar »

mitch-snipline wrote: post #20

I got quite excited at being able to stick my static sites on DO for free, but notice on this page[1] that only the first three are free, then it's $3/m/site. Perhaps I've been spoiled by services like Netlify. I'd be interested to know what the benefits are of using DO's service over free alternatives. [1] https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8

Why not just use github pages for static sites?

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#165

Post by stickfigure »

user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

Don't forget Google App Engine! Though, it's even more expensive than Heroku.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#166

Post by bastawhiz »

avolcano wrote: post #89

Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups. I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB). Additionally, my web app is a…

In my experience, the Heroku $9/mo plan isn't usable for anything production-ready. I had to upgrade to the next tier when I crossed about 100 active users. For $9/mo, you're also getting a pretty prohibitive row limit and a really low connection limit. DO's $7/mo dev database is more in line with Heroku's dev offering.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#167

Post by bastawhiz »

stickfigure wrote: post #165
user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

Don't forget Google App Engine! Though, it's even more expensive than Heroku.

Has GAE sorted out secrets management? Last I checked, they required you to commit secrets to the repo you push, which necessitates your secrets being on whatever computer (or whoever's computer) does production deploys. Contrast this with DO/Heroku/etc. which lets you set environment variables.

Some folks suggest using a DB to store secrets on GAE, but this is (IMO) just obfuscation.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#168

Post by westoncb »

user5994461 wrote: post #124
076ae80a-3c97-4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably worth looking into the big cloud providers rather than the little guys. In Azure you can have an app service (a deployed app in any one of loads of languages without looking after the machine it sits on) with 1.75GB RAM for about $12 a month. Obviously your usage may vary and that will effect the price. But I get the feeling that the big players are cheaper than people think they are for small projects.

The big players have separate charges for bandwidth and disk and other hidden stuff. They are way more expensive than Digital Ocean / OVH all inclusive. Worse, the costs is unpredictable which makes them a no go for a side project, I can't risk accidentally getting a $1000 bill. As a real world example, I run a personal blog. If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featur…

> If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featured on HN and served 1+ TB of traffic.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it looks like 1 TB of outgoing traffic would be ~$90

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

I've had things hit the HN front page a few times while just hosting on ec2 and never had a noticeable increase in charges. Then again, I wasn't hosting very large files.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#169

Post by anurag »

wasd wrote: post #109

Very cool. I'll definitely give it a test spin. I've been a big fan of PaaS but Render / App Engine / Beanstalk fall a bit short on dev ux. This looks the most promising. If you can add multiple regions and wildcard ssl, you'll solve 2 big problems we have with Heroku.

If you're up for doing us a favor, I'd love to learn about the UX specifics we fell short on. Email is my username @render.com. Thank you!

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#170

Post by ev1 »

westoncb wrote: post #168
user5994461 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big players have separate charges for bandwidth and disk and other hidden stuff. They are way more expensive than Digital Ocean / OVH all inclusive. Worse, the costs is unpredictable which makes them a no go for a side project, I can't risk accidentally getting a $1000 bill. As a real world example, I run a personal blog. If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featur…

> If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featured on HN and served 1+ TB of traffic. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it looks like 1 TB of outgoing traffic would be ~$90 https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ I've had things hit the HN front page a few times while just hosting on ec2 and never had a noticeable increase in charges. Then again, I wasn't hosting very large fi…

If you do host large-ish files, even a couple MB JPGs, your personal finance wouldn't be happy.

I've had some images hit reddit (hotlinked) and exceeded 10-15TB per image, and that cost under $10 at other (non-AWS/Azure/*) places.

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