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Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Aeza primary: co-located server running Proxmox also cloudflare workers, cloudflare pages, github pages
܁ DigitalOcean droplet(s) with Docker service preinstalled.
܁ All services are running with docker-compose.
܁ Managed Postgresql and spaces for storage.
܁ Cloudflare free tier and their `tunnel` product as a reverse proxy into your docker-compose network is super useful.
܁ Github actions and container registry to compile and sync container images. We have staging/production environments. Some GitHub actions run idempotent Bash scripts to prepare droplets.
܁ Shameless plug, I am up for hire.
DigitalOcean is okay-ish although, I don’t feel like their services can handle high amounts of traffic. Their offering is rather complete though as they have an object store with free CDN support, managed DBs, managed app deployment platform (or nodes you can manage or kubernetes distribution) to run apps.
Have you considered using a provider that might help eliminate some of the operational burden of running your apps? At a very high level, when using the big 3 and hosting that's raw infra you're going to find ways to pay for _keeping things running smoothly_. At least the big three have happy paths to avoid some of the operational burden (hidden among many many foot guns). Full disclosure I work at noop.dev [1], a ho…
In countries where VC money is much drier, many start-ups begin on VPS' and only move to the cloud when scalability becomes a real issue.
This though, is generally frowned upon by contemporary tech culture.
Their backup is not at a block level just because they can optimize it for their benefit which limits the partition be formatted only in unencrypted ext3 or ext4 to be able to use their backup service.
https://www.linode.com/docs/products/storage/backups/#additi...
I don't like them sweeping through list of files daily and their backup service choked having millions of files a few years ago while I was still with them. Backing up at a block level will never impose such limitations.
So, their backup service which is one of the reason to use a cloud with hefty 20% added charge, is pretty much meaningless if you're using zfs. Haven't checked all but a provider taking backup at a file system level should be totally the minority.
I've used Digital Ocean for nearly 10 years. It's been good. That said: I don't know enough about your situation, but ... what are you optimizing for? AWS/GCP/Azure have each got a platform that provides a heap of functionality. Using that will save you time-to-delivery and engineer-hours. All the clouds have startup programs that will mean it's basically free until you get some traction. If you're looking for invest…
I laughed how they were supposed to just install MySQL locally and avoided all that. If you wanted point in time recovery, just read the doc for an hour and do it yourself when you have to spend more time reading warning email from AWS and search around to see what they meant for unnecessary interactions of their artificial limitations.
Some people seem to think using "heaps of services" make them look smarter but they're not.
Free plans are to lure you into their locked up ecosystem and gives you no gain on knowledge by dealing with their limitations, rather better to learn the tools you're using.
You most likely are going to need more services like cloud object storage and a managed DB. Running all these services by yourself will be hard and should be avoided unless necessary (e.g. compliance). DigitalOcean is okay-ish although, I don’t feel like their services can handle high amounts of traffic. Their offering is rather complete though as they have an object store with free CDN support, managed DBs, managed…
At least by running stuff yourself, you gain universal knowledge that lasts as long as you're using that software but learning the way of AWS is a complete waste if you ever leave them.
Do people nowadays think they're smart by using the myriad of provided services for no good reason not knowing they're being locked and milked?
My old trusty Dell PowerEdge R720 in the utility room at home. It works fine, and powers everything from web hosting to locally running LLM's. It would have costed a fortune running the equivalent compute capacity in any of the big 3.
When I saw one of my server not coming back up at home for some reason on a reboot, I realized I needed spare hardware to reliably operate them. I can't let it stay offline while I order for the spare parts to arrive, even though I have backup data ready elsewhere to be restored.
Agree that cloud is too expensive these days. When you realize buying a server with 32 GB memory with 1TB nvme is only $250 (apparently no virtual neighbors bugging for your resource) and you're meant to pay that same price monthly to be on the cloud, it starts to feel like a joke.
I would really question why these are your major concerns. You are going to burn through a lot of time and resources worrying about cloud lock in and being cloud agnostic. That’s energy that should go into building your product and finding customers.