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The answer is cheap shared hosting that supports old-school standards: CGI (or FastCGI), and your choice of Perl/Python/Ruby/NodeJS/Go/Rust/etc. For a hobbyist

The answer is cheap shared hosting that supports old-school standards: CGI (or FastCGI), and your choice of Perl/Python/Ruby/NodeJS/Go/Rust/etc. For a hobbyist project with minimal traffic, you can afford to deal with the application's startup latency. (Java / Scala are probably out, though. Don't know about Erlang, haven't used it). Dreamhost is affordable enough and will do such things.

merb 11y ago
I've setup Java/Scala projects on 5 USD hosts. Why are they out? With SSD's you could even run a bunch of them thanks to swapfiles.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  Oh, they're out for shared-hosting CGI/FastCGI only, because of high startup time and high memory usage and the fact that no one in Java ever uses that deployment model. If you're doing droplet-based stuff I'm sure it could work, but I don't think the author is satisfied with the costs of running multiple projects.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  Java / Scala can get dicy on $5 host. Problem 1) SBT cannot run with 512 ram, so you cannot compile locally. If using phat jars, that means you need to upload a 100mb jar every time you want to deploy, vs just a git pull and a build. May or may not matter to you. Problem 2) Once you start doing some actual work, the JVM itself is taking up a few 100 MB of ram, and the OS takes up a fair bit.. this leaves something like 128MB ram for your app best case.. for a lot of apps this is not enough. I had to go up to at least 1 GB VMs to get my medium complexity Scala app to work in prod, and I have been tuning JVMs for many years.
  - merb 11y ago
    fallocate -l 4G /swapfile chmod 600 /swapfile mkswap /swapfile swapon /swapfile swapon -s Works pretty well. You can't actually run too much on it however if you use a tomcat you actually get a decent Request per Second something like 100r/s. And you don't need 1GB VMs. 512 MB Scala Apps are working fine. It just depends on the technology.
tdeck 11y ago
I've had success running several things on Dokku, on top of a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet. You do have to create a swapfile to compensate for how little RAM there is, but after that Dokku is very easy to set up, and provides Heroku-style git push deployment for many different languages and environments. It also makes it very easy to set up databases (postgres, redis, memcached, etc...), and as an added bonus there's a great Let's Encrypt plugin that makes adding TLS a ten second job.

merb 11y ago

I've setup Java/Scala projects on 5 USD hosts. Why are they out? With SSD's you could even run a bunch of them thanks to swapfiles.

fennecfoxen 11y ago
Oh, they're out for shared-hosting CGI/FastCGI only, because of high startup time and high memory usage and the fact that no one in Java ever uses that deployment model. If you're doing droplet-based stuff I'm sure it could work, but I don't think the author is satisfied with the costs of running multiple projects.
brianwawok 11y ago
Java / Scala can get dicy on $5 host. Problem 1) SBT cannot run with 512 ram, so you cannot compile locally. If using phat jars, that means you need to upload a 100mb jar every time you want to deploy, vs just a git pull and a build. May or may not matter to you. Problem 2) Once you start doing some actual work, the JVM itself is taking up a few 100 MB of ram, and the OS takes up a fair bit.. this leaves something like 128MB ram for your app best case.. for a lot of apps this is not enough. I had to go up to at least 1 GB VMs to get my medium complexity Scala app to work in prod, and I have been tuning JVMs for many years.
- merb 11y ago
  fallocate -l 4G /swapfile chmod 600 /swapfile mkswap /swapfile swapon /swapfile swapon -s Works pretty well. You can't actually run too much on it however if you use a tomcat you actually get a decent Request per Second something like 100r/s. And you don't need 1GB VMs. 512 MB Scala Apps are working fine. It just depends on the technology.

tdeck 11y ago

I've had success running several things on Dokku, on top of a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet. You do have to create a swapfile to compensate for how little RAM there is, but after that Dokku is very easy to set up, and provides Heroku-style git push deployment for many different languages and environments. It also makes it very easy to set up databases (postgres, redis, memcached, etc...), and as an added bonus there's a great Let's Encrypt plugin that makes adding TLS a ten second job.