I’m using a DigitalOcean Droplet and running a Dockerized application inside it. Can easily take the image to another provider if I want. No lock in.
Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
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Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#12I used successfully OnPremise, OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner, and a few local and small OpenStack cloud providers.
Why do you want to avoid the main cloud providers? Is it needed for your startup or you want to add extra risk and complexity?
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#13Linode exclusively for 10 + years. Brilliant Service. Even still decent when acquired by Akamai
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#14I agree with your requirement to avoid lock in, but there's nothing wrong with using the big three if you make sure you use open source technologies.
I'm going to use the LAMP stack for example, because everyone is familiar with it.
For example, if you choose MySQL (rather than AWS Aurora) you can:
1. Run that locally during development
2. Install it yourself on a VPS
3. Or migrate to any of the big clouds quite easily
Same goes for your stack. Rather than using PHP with AWS Lambda, provision VMs and install PHP yourself (probably using some sort of shell script).
All cloud providers offer a VM in one form or another, so you're free to swap to another one when you choose.
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#15I agree with your requirement to avoid lock in, but there's nothing wrong with using the big three if you make sure you use open source technologies. I'm going to use the LAMP stack for example, because everyone is familiar with it. For example, if you choose MySQL (rather than AWS Aurora) you can: 1. Run that locally during development 2. Install it yourself on a VPS 3. Or migrate to any of the big clouds quite easi…
The only exception I have to this is S3. There are so many S3 compatible providers that I don't see any problem with using S3. There's even MinIO for self hosting and local development!
Some more suggestions for open source components:
Redis for caching and queueing SMTP for mail Nginx for load balancing Cron for scheduling
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#161. Dockerize everything
2. Self host through Cloudflare tunnels. Works fine enough for little traffic as long as you are not maxing out bandwidth for data transmission.
3. When you grow, easy enough to move the containers to the cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#17I agree with your requirement to avoid lock in, but there's nothing wrong with using the big three if you make sure you use open source technologies. I'm going to use the LAMP stack for example, because everyone is familiar with it. For example, if you choose MySQL (rather than AWS Aurora) you can: 1. Run that locally during development 2. Install it yourself on a VPS 3. Or migrate to any of the big clouds quite easi…
The only exception I have to this is S3. There are so many S3 compatible providers that I don't see any problem with using S3. There's even MinIO for self hosting and local development! Some more suggestions for open source components: Redis for caching and queueing SMTP for mail Nginx for load balancing Cron for scheduling
> The only exception I have to this is S3. There are so many S3 compatible providers that I don't see any problem with using S3.
I've strongly held this view in the past but after recently being on a project where we trialed using other providers, there's a lot missing compared to the AWS S3 offering that has made me rethink this stance a bit
Permissions being a big one, many providers offer little to no fine grained control. With Digital Ocean for example it's all or nothing, you can only generate access keys that gives full access to all buckets[0]
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#18I'm going to make a left field suggestion and say Modal Labs if you're mostly Python based:
It should work with other languages through Docker and their Python API, but I can't speak to the ease of deployment in that case.
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#19I don't think you've shared sufficient information about your requirements to give you a good suggestion.
If you're already running container workloads, DigitalOcean has a managed Kubernetes offering that's quite decent. If you're only using VMs so far, I don't think you'll gain anything by introducing the complexity of the bigger cloud providers (managing VPC, subnets, firewalling).
Of course you can use a cloud provider and just stick with a common stack that can be easily moved to different providers or hosted on metal/on-prem once the need arises.
In order to provide a more useful answer, I'd like to know your current tech stack and a rough estimate of traffic/users.
I've done consulting for various clients who wanted to move from on-prem to cloud and vice versa and as long as you stay clear of the proprietary products you shouldn't worry that much about cloud lock-in. Stick with Postgres/MySQL, redis, containers/VMs and try to have as much of your infra in code, if possible.
Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?
#20For my personal hobby projects I use Vultr. I used to use DigitalOcean and others but found that Vultr has better performance/price, both in my ad-hoc experience and in benchmarks when I was choosing. My needs are minimal, but I do like the private networking and IPv6, I've used separate storage volumes and metadata service, but not very much.
I agree with others that it's not a good idea for an actual company building a real product. You'll likely soon get into a situation where a using an available cloud service/feature will simply solve something avoiding a lot of infrastructure/development work for trade-off in paying the price for a service. Cloud-agnostic isn't a worthwhile goal for a 'true' startup, where calendar time and developer time should me things to optimize for more than cloud bills. The idea is to iterate/pivot quickly and using services to try stuff is the advantage. If this doesn't match your 'startup', that's fine and you can choose based on your criteria.