11–20 of 82 posts
I've been using Render and Fly.io Render is the closest thing to Heroku's ease of deployment currently. Major disadvantage is the larger build times.
What makes fly not as easy as render?
(I am contemplating moving off heroku, and these seem to be the major contenders for analogous ease of operations).
If I had to start over, I'd just do AWS App Runner. AWS is complex, but it's reliable - you won't have to pay huge minimums or subscriptions to host a side project. And, it will (hopefully) be dependable as a host long-term.
There's lots of potential complexity to K8s, but if you're not managing the cluster and you have simple workloads the ratio of "stuff you have to learn" to "benefits you get" is pretty high. You can deploy anything that runs in a container, so it's really good for experimenting and not being tied down to one language or platform.
I can add a new service by copying and pasting a yaml file or two and it's up and running within a half hour or so.
Serverless is great for side-projects because the scale based pricing effectively makes things free unless they really take off. And if it ever does go to decent scale, there's a good chance you don't need to re-architect or even tune anything to scale up with traffic. If you wanted to prioritize 100% predictable fixed costs over everything else, then maybe a VPS would be a better option.
I don't really like any of the static site generator's out there, so I just build an ejs site and parse it using a project I built called statictron [1]. I'm using it for a site [2] I'm building at the moment, and it's a pretty smooth and cleap deployment. I did end up pushing the files to bunny.net (a EU based CDN), as its surprisingly much faster than GitHub pages. But I'm just being picky, as Pages is practically more than fast enough.
For anything that requires server side hosting, render.com is great, or digitalocean if I want something I can control more. I don't really want to buy into the whole ecosystem of things like Heroku, GCP, AWS as I like to make sure I can leave when/if they do bad things.
I'm also increasingly moving stuff back to dedicated hosting. I do try and automate as much of the deployment stuff as possible, and use docker to wrap the services.
It's actually amazing how much cheaper a dedicated server is, vs cloud companies, once you're using more than a few services. I'd normally say one of the benefits is your DevOps teams should be cheaper, but in the end I've found the teams that would be managing the dedicated servers, end up being just as big to support the cloud infrastructure platforms.
Previously I was self-hosted on a colo box I have using a PaaS I used to work on called Flynn - but it's about time to retire that machine, it's a 7 year-old Xeon and the power it draws has to be insane compared to the 3 ARM instances it's now running on.
The world has moved on from Flynn sadly and now it's my turn too.