Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#11

Post by runjake » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

dith3r wrote: post #7

Oracle cloud has free tier with 4 arm vcpus/24G ram/200GB SSD.

Some good questions to ask in this case:

- How long will this last?

- What's in it for Oracle?

Oracle is not known for its benevolence or free services. Quite the opposite.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#12

Post by icedchai » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

Have you looked into optimizing your AWS costs? Where is most of it going? Compute, storage, bandwidth?

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#13

Post by icedchai » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

runjake wrote: post #11

dith3r wrote: post #7

Oracle cloud has free tier with 4 arm vcpus/24G ram/200GB SSD.

Some good questions to ask in this case: - How long will this last? - What's in it for Oracle? Oracle is not known for its benevolence or free services. Quite the opposite.

Also keep in mind there's a lot more talent available to work with AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#14

Post by mobilio » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

dakiol wrote: post #8

Hijacking the thread: also looking for some super cheap VPS for running Go servers (don’t need more than 256-512 MB). I know i have digitalocean for ~$5/month, but i’m looking for something more like $1 or €2 per month.

Huge list of providers in that price range

https://lowendbox.com/

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#15

Post by rganesan » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

Have you looked at Amazon Lightsail? It's relatively cheap if you don't need a lot of scale, compared to other cheap alternative. Oracle free tier is another option.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#16

Post by tumidpandora » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

Lightsail on AWS, fixed pricing

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#17

Post by W6zVktFA » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 5:32 PM UTC

Elestio

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#18

Post by toast0 » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

You can easily get a VPS for around $5/month from quality vendors. You can probably find a lot of offers around $1/month for a VPS on lowendbox, lowendtalk, and webhostingtalk.

If you want more oomph than that, you can find dedicated server offers at those three places, starting around maybe $30/month. Typically pretty old systems, but I enjoy having a whole ancient box rather than one core in a vm on a modern box. My personal hosting needs are tiny though, so I could fit back into the VPS if money were an issue.

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#19

Post by TheKelsbee » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

Hi! AWS Developer Advocate here. Depending on the nonprofit/charity status it's possible they could qualify for free or reduced price hosting. There are a few different programs that you could qualify for.

There is also the Techsoup organization, which helps nonprofits and charities with technology needs: https://page.techsoup.org/amazon-web-services-for-nonprofits

I would highly recommend looking through there for not just AWS specific tools & services, but a wide variety of solutions that might help this charity.

Please feel free to reach out directly to me for additional assistance. Hope this helps!

Re: Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

#20

Post by billconan » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

I'm paying $0.45 for my personal lambda/dynamodb based service. but my traffic is very low.