7 ms·
Ask HN: Where should I host my startup?
I am done with the coding and I would like to shoot my site into the wild and start some marketing. What are some of the best and most reliable options? Possibly cheaper ones..
Thanks so much.
- acarrera 10y agoif looking into digitalocean, vultr.com is slightly better in terms of pricing and processors, though it takes much longer (~2-3mins) to spin up a vm instead of <60s in digitalocean
- the_common_man 10y agoThis is not true if you have custom snapshots. DO takes quiet a bit of time if you have custom images. My experience with vultr is that it boots very fast (<1 min)
- hiphopyo 10y agoDoes DO even offer custom images? Last I spoke to the owner he said they had other priorities.
- hiphopyo 10y agoI must strongly agree with this one. Just switched from DigitalOcean to Vultr myself. Vultr is the only decent one I'm aware of who'll let me run OpenBSD. No other OS is good enough for me. Strongest security in the world, and no need to update as frequently as with other OSes or distros. Choose OpenBSD for your Unix needs. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD, the OpenSSL rewrite LibreSSL, and the NTP rewrite OpenNTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax.
- imaginenore 10y agoCheap: browse through the listings on lowendbox.com, you will find some amazing deals for both VPS and dedicated servers. Reliable: AWS / Rackspace / DigitalOcean / Google cloud / basically any famous one. When you're starting, it's probably better to rent a cheap VPS server. If you start growing fast, you can always move to the cloud. But modern cheap VPSs are quite powerful. I have 7 websites running on one that costs me $6/month.
- badsock 10y agoHas DigitalOcean gotten better for reliability? I took my company off of them about 2 years ago specifically because of their frequent downtime.
- imaginenore 10y agoI haven't dealt with them in a while, but most of the feedback I read about them is great.
- colinbartlett 10y agoI've been using for more than 2 years with 100% uptime.
- iurisilvio 10y agoI have around 20-30 instances there and it is a long time since the last fail. In the past it failed a lot (~1 instance completely fail per month), but I think it is better now.
- sixhobbits 10y agoCurious, what's your definition of "the cloud"? Under mine, running off a cheap vps is very representative of "running in the cloud". What would the "move to the cloud" entail? Do you mean using more services such as lambda, S3, or a database as a service platform as opposed to doing this "manually" by installing software on a clean OS? For me: buying a rack/dedicated machine is the "traditional" (though increasingly rare) option and running off a vps is "in the cloud"
- chias 10y agoIf "$10 / month" counts as cheap in your book, check out a Linode VPS. I've been using them for a couple years now, and I have been extremely satisfied (although I've upgraded to a beefier VPS as my project has grown in popularity). Another good VPS option is DigitalOcean, which offers a smaller (and cheaper) plan for $5 / month. There are also a lot of shared hosting providers out there that will sell you cheaper space, but I would not recommend this for anything non-trivial, as most of the time, you'll be limited to using PHP. Still, if you're looking for the best bang for your buck and you're willing to settle for shared hosting, check out Nearly Free Speech -- they are head and shoulders above any other shared hosting provider that I have ever tried.
- iamben 10y agoAnother thumbs up for Nearly Free Speech. Excellent value for money and more than capable of dealing with traffic spikes.
- nhebb 10y agoLinode has a $10 / month plan as well.
- chias 10y agoAh, you're right! Thank you for the correction. It's $10 and $5, I shall edit accordingly.
- komaromy 10y agoIf you're considering Linode, you should read up on their history of security incidents and make sure it's a risk you're willing to take.
- chias 10y agoIndeed - it's always good to be aware of these things. I've been around for most of them and I am still very happy to use them, but of course your own perspective may differ.
- 10y ago
- ggregoire 10y agoAWS has a free plan during 12 months: https://aws.amazon.com/free https://aws.amazon.com/free
- hbcondo714 10y agoMicrosoft's BizSpark program gives startups $150/month in Azure credits for 3 years https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/bizspark-startups/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/bizs...
- palmeida 10y agoJust to add that it is $150/month in Azure credits per user in the startup to a maximum of 5
- pimterry 10y agoIf you're talking about hosting your startup's landing page, stick with Github Pages: https://pages.github.com/ https://pages.github.com/. Free, super quick & easy, with custom domains to boot. Personally, for almost any product I start here. Even if you do need server-side infrastructure for the product, hosting all your marketing pages on GH pages is probably the right choice - they're going to be better at reliably hosting and serving static content than you are. Focus on your product instead. When I do need server-side logic I then usually go for Digital Ocean, because they're very cheap, pretty great, and far less complicated to manage than EC2. It's also pretty easy to set up Dokku: https://medium.com/@pimterry/host-your-node-app-on-dokku-digitalocean-1cb97e3ab041#.4idyklakq https://medium.com/@pimterry/host-your-node-app-on-dokku-dig.... With that on top you then get a quick & effective Heroku-style deployment experience, at a fraction of the price.
- colinbartlett 10y agoSince Github Pages doesn't support SSL/TLS certificates for custom domains, I don't think anyone should be using it. It's simply outdated technology.
- jobvandervoort 10y agoYou can host static pages on GitLab.com for free, with TLS certificates and custom domains. You can use _any_ static site generator.
- franciscop 10y agoThere are definitely ways to add SSL to Github Pages https://superdom.site/ https://superdom.site/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bobfunk 10y agoHave a look at netlify (https://www.netlify.com https://www.netlify.com). Free plan as well, but we include https, support any build tool (not just jekyll), have integrated CDN support, deploy preview (get a unique URL for each pull request) and much, much more.
- iraklism 10y agoHetzner is another option. But you don't really specify your requirements (geographical region, scalability , etc) so I don't know if this suits you.
- idlewords 10y agoBig thumbs up for Hetzner.
- Doctor_Fegg 10y agoYep, another vote for them here. It's expected that you're 100% capable of admining your own box, but as long as you're happy with that, the price/power ratio is pretty much unbeatable.
- akoncius 10y agoearlier we had issues with storage - we had multiple VMs on same box and main storage stopped working properly, and then we had lots of trouble restoring data / moving somewhere else.. :/ after that incident we went to digitalocean . so keep in mind reliability too.
- PetahNZ 10y agoIf you are willing to shell out a little more ($40), you can get a pretty powerful DS for a fraction of the cost of what the major cloud providers would cost: https://www.delimiter.com https://www.delimiter.com
- wtvanhest 10y agoIt depends on how much you want to do yourself. Heroku is easiest and relatively cheap until you scale. (Great problem) Lots of people seem to use AWS. My limited understanding is that it is marginally more difficult to implement than heroku. You could also go with someone like Linode. I would only go that route if you have implemented before. There is a learning curve and if you are trying to get the site up quick, I would go with a different option.
- nodesocket 10y agoDepending on your application and stack, you may want to consider Google Cloud or AWS. While I really like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, etc they lack production features like a centralized firewall and IAM security. Additionally AWS and Google have a slew of complimentary services so maybe you don't need raw physical machines. For example, instead you may be able to use Elasticache, RDS, and Elastic Container Service and don't have to manage any servers.
- ing33k 10y agoyou should check out free tier offered by Amazon https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/ Also do apply for things like BizSpark https://bizspark.microsoft.com/ https://bizspark.microsoft.com/ if you have a static marketing page, you can also host it for free ( almost ? ) on https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/ https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/
- boulos 10y agoYes, for a site that can just be hosted on the Firebase free tier (https://firebase.google.com/pricing/ https://firebase.google.com/pricing/) you can go a long way (the same is true of the App Engine free tier). The OP stated they had already written something though, so my guess is that rewriting to Firebase wouldn't work (if it's just a SPA front-end app in Javascript, fine, but if there's any backend a rewrite seems more hassle than it's worth).
- d0m 10y agoPersonally had bad experience with linode.. I'd go with aws.
- smoyer 10y agoRedhat offers free services (you pick which ones) via their OpenShift [0] platform. Under the covers it's Docker and Kubernetes. [0] https://developers.openshift.com/getting-started/index.html?sc_cid=701600000011p9xAAA&gclid=CMbt7eWnzs8CFdcSgQod5k0HDQ https://developers.openshift.com/getting-started/index.html?...
- shanecleveland 10y agoWebfaction. I don't do anything with heavy traffic, but very happy with reliability, performance and features.
- andrewl-hn 10y agoNo one has mentioned Heroku yet. Starting at $7 they are a bit more expensive than DigitalOcean, but with that extra $2 you'll get their platform, their tooling for deploying the app, their database backups. Adding other services later on is also easy with their addons. By choosing Heroku you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars in ops costs over a course of a few months. The hosting cost may go up quickly, but if your business is successful you can either absorb it, or spend time and money to migrate away. They run on AWS, so picking the same location means you can run mixed infrastructure (part on Heroku, and part on AWS) without a latency hit. Thus, a hybrid configuration is very viable.
- idlewords 10y agoUsing Heroku puts two levels of bloat between you and the hardware, and locks you into a hosting environment that becomes very expensive quickly. Eschew.
- dougbarrett 10y agoHow does it lock you into their hosting environment? The apps I've made I've been able to transfer to and from Heroku without any modifications.
- tjpd 10y agoI disagree with this wholeheartedly and just posted why above but wanted to reiterate it here. This might just have been a throw-away comment but "bloat", lock-in & cost are red-herrings. "Bloat" here is a virtue. Heroku removes two levels of drudgery and administration between you and the hardware. Who wants to be racking hardware? Who wants to be patching the OS? Who wants to be dealing with package vulnerabilities? None of this helps actually build the business Lock-in is minimal, particularly if it's a self contained app and you're not using a lot of services. There are countless examples of companies who've moved off of Heroku when they've gotten big. Plus there's also lock-in using EC2, S3, AWS. There's lock-in of some level regardless where you run your stuff. Future cost is also really, very very low because P(success) is, sadly, super low.
- flaie 10y agoClever cloud is a good option, they're very good at what they're doing. Plans start low, and you can scale easily when needed. They do have plenty of options, and support is top notch.
- DeBraid 10y agonow.sh https://zeit.co/now/ https://zeit.co/now/ and surge.sh https://surge.sh https://surge.sh are some lesser-known options that I've used recently with ease and success (on free plan, for small projects).
- biot 10y agoSince you've provided no details at all for your requirements (does your startup need a flotilla of beefy servers to do real-time facial recognition across thousands of live 4K video feeds?) I'm assuming you have a static HTML site with zero backend required. In that case, a Jekyll/Hugo generated site hosted on Amazon S3 will be really cheap. Throw CloudFlare in front of it for even more cheapness if you expect loads of traffic. Your hosting bill will be measured in pennies per month.
- jimmywanger 10y agoI'd go with GCE. They have a wide suite of services, and because they're the number three player right now, will probably give you a bunch of free credit to play with.
- tjpd 10y agoReading a lot of these comments make me think that everyone on HN is a cynic of the Oscar Wilde/Lady Windermere variety: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" [1]. IMHO you should go with Heroku and ignore anyone who's suggesting dedicated servers, VPSes, AWS, Docker or containers. Every moment you spend maintaining a server or doing devops is wasted because it's time not spent building or marketing your _app_. New startups' biggest expense is founders' time. It seems a lot of people, even on HN, don't realise it because it's a hidden cost. But if you think that a decent developer is worth at least $50/hr and it might take you an 1hr to set up and 1hr/yr to manage a server (e.g. apply patches, update security) then you're better off not spending those 2hrs and paying an extra $100 hosting your app. Worrying about the future infrastructure cost is also wrong-headed. It's a kind of premature optimisation. To get the real, expected future cost, the projected infrastructure cost has to be multiplied by the probability that you'll actually get big, which for start-ups, is very low. [1]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/790/790-h/790-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/790/790-h/790-h.htm
- bbcbasic 10y agoI think this logic applies to side projects too. Unless the infrastructure stuff is of interest in itself, it is better to let someone else take that pain away. The beauty being that to do so for a side project is free or almost free. > But if you think that a decent developer is worth at least $50/hr and it might take you an 1hr to set up and 1hr/yr to manage a server (e.g. apply patches, update security) then you're better off not spending those 2hrs and paying an extra $100 hosting your app. It doesn't change your point (it enhances it actually) but I'd say you need the 1hr/1hr for heroku (to learn their way of doing things etc.) and 24h/8h for the self-hosted, based on my experiences. But I am not a linux whizz.
- cdnsteve 10y agoManaging and maintaining systems takes precious time. When things break it takes even more time. I strongly agree using Heroku here as well. However, you can still leverage the AWS managed services selectively so the two of them work together. EG: - AWS S3, AWS SQS
- mozumder 10y ago
- nwilkens 10y agoDo you have any special requirements -- such as location, high memory, io performance, or storage capacity? At https://mnx.io https://mnx.io (my company) we offer various options with reliability, and performance at our foundation.
- adjohn 10y agoCheck out Digital Ocean Hatch[1]. If you're an eligible startup, you can get 100K of free credits for 12 months. [1] - https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/
- boulos 10y agoAs people asked, what do you need "today" (host website apparently) and what do you need "tomorrow"? If you just need a simple static-ish web app, and everything else is your offline iOS game that's pretty different from building say a Snapchat competitor. Full disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, but it's unclear you need a cloud provider.
- seanwilson 10y agoThis highly depends on if your site is dynamic or static. If static, I would go with GitHub Pages or Netlify as they're free/cheap and easy to use. Static sites with this kind of hosting is also great in that they require practically zero maintenance. If you have to run a dynamic site (less potential headaches if you avoid this), I would try to use something like Heroku. It's easily one of the simplest way to host a robust site that needs to scale without having to spend much time on admin and DevOps. For the people recommending a VPS, DigitalOcean etc., you're talking about using a huge amount of your own time to make such a setup as robust, easy to use and low maintenance as Heroku. What about backups? Scripting server creation? Adding a load balancer and more servers? Security updates? Server security? The more parts and scripts you have to put together yourself, the more things that can go wrong and the more time of yours it's going to consume. If you consider how much your own time is worth and how important your startup is to you, trying to save anything in the realm of $10 a month on a core part of your startup doesn't make any sense if this is going to cost you multiple hours of time a month.
- Lxr 10y agoHonest question, what does Heroku offer over Elastic Beanstalk other than being more expensive? I switched to EB and it seems more flexible and a lot cheaper, and I haven't wasted hours on admin.
- seanwilson 10y ago> Honest question, what does Heroku offer over Elastic Beanstalk other than being more expensive? I switched to EB and it seems more flexible and a lot cheaper, and I haven't wasted hours on admin. I said "something like Heroku" and Elastic Beanstalk is similar.
- filp 10y agoElasticBeanstalk is a lot more flexible, since it's basically just a wrapper around existing AWS services.
- erikb 10y agoDon't trust anybody who doesn't start with "it depends". For nothing in this world there is one perfect answer. Context means a lot. What have you coded? Why do you think you are done if it is not running anywhere (I would say you are 20% done if it runs on your laptop)? How many people need to use it to be viable (e.g. a diary service needs only one user who writes texts for himself, a shop needs at least make its hosting and transportation fees, a social network needs thousands of people before it can even start to be successful)? Good general advice is this: The simplest solution is often the best, but in some cases that means taking your old desktop pc, install ubuntu, configure your router to publicly share http and https from that computer. In other cases it means using a toolset like Heroku. Please don't be mad about this, but the way you phrase your question it is very very likely you have so little skill that you don't even know how little. Please consider to pay a freelancer to support you. He likely has more skill and has experienced more "this can never happen in real life" F-Ups than you, and therefore can handle a lot.
- solipsism 10y ago"skill"? That's bullshit, you can't tell anything about skill from a person's poorly phrased question. Especially since that person's primary language might not be English.
- gagzilla 10y agoSometimes the best question is the simplest one. I agree the original has a lot of scope of improvements but I prefer the debate and the range of answers which wouldn't have been the case if the original question was more specific.
- erikb 10y agoIn fact you can tell a lot about what questions people ask. The more specific and detailed a question is, the better the person knows the topic. A skilled language learner would never ask "What is the best way to learn English?" because he knows already that there is no best way, in fact there is no single way. He knows that he needs to combine different methods and which are the common methods and how well they work for him. By recognizing a misconception that people have at a certain skill level you can guess their skill level quite acurately. Beginners usually want to solve the biggest of problems, and be done after the next weekend. Mid-levelers usually have specific questions about a method that must be the one true best solution in their eyes, but somehow they struggle with topic X. High skilled people usually ask questions that can't be googled, and even other experts need to look into the problem more deeply to figure it out together. It's also hard to fake, since you need have some experience in the area to recognize how your current believe is limited. You cannot ask a ungoogleble question if you don't know already most of what can be googled about that topic.
- coupdejarnac 10y agoI haven't seen it mentioned yet, but Redhat's Openshift provides an alternative to Heroku. I've used it for a few years and been happy with it. They have a startup program that gives you access to a paid tier for a year. I've used Openshift to host Node and Flask apps. Edit: a bunch of downvotes for trying to be helpful, how nice.
- LaurentVB 10y agoI was pretty happy with openshift until I recently discovered it was impossible to update the version of an os package I depended on. On heroku, custom buildpack and it was done in 5 minutes.
- jhylau 10y agoFor any non-static website - Heroku FOR SURE. It's not even a question - I have two companies that both run on Heroku - both startups are profitable and both will remain on Heroku for the next couple of years. (https://www.switchup.org https://www.switchup.org and https://www.trycarriage.com https://www.trycarriage.com) - I know massive scale billion dollar companies that are on Heroku (e.g. Deliveroo, Macy's) The cost/benefit analysis is ALWAYS positive in favor of Heroku until you hit super massive scale (minimum 2-3 years out for most startups, if ever). It's super easy to use. Their feature set is increasing monthly and they can handle a lot of different types of setups.
- jtcond13 10y agoAmazon's PaaS offering (Elastic Beanstalk) isn't too difficult to use and may be less expensive than Heroku.
- ddorian43 10y agoCheck out webfaction https://www.webfaction.com/?aid=9281 https://www.webfaction.com/?aid=9281. It's cheaper/better than shared/heroku/dedicated/vps/ec2 up until a certain point (48GB ram).
- trcollinson 10y agoCan you give us an idea of what your site is built in? Personally I have a side project I am working on which I am just hosting on the free allocation of AWS. Even if it weren't in the free tier, it would be extremely inexpensive. With that, I have a lot of experience deploying to AWS and I have scripted most of the process (in fact, other than some monitoring, at this point, the deployment process is entirely automated). This would work for just about any architecture. But, the difficulty of setup will cause your mileage to vary a bit.
- borplk 10y agoAs someone who wasted time and money with AWS I'd say start with something simple like DigitalOcean and worry about problems as you face them.
- catalinbraescu 10y agoIt looks like you're confusing your startup (which is a company) with your web site.
- epynonymous 10y agowhy can't you use just aws micro free t1? they give you a micro machine for 1 year free. what loads do you anticipate, what hw requirements do you need for your machine? i think hosting a simple website with sqlite database works great on an aws micro, if you need something more glorified like postgresql or mysql and multi-tier, then perhaps you should go for something like digital ocean or paid aws, this all depends on your requirements which you haven't specified. currently i'm hosting a golang web + restful api + websocket server + sqlite3 db + redis + nginx all on a single micro AWS server, but my marketing hasn't really started yet, we're talking about <100 hits thus far per day.
- pier25 10y agoWe are super happy with Firebase. Even if you just use the static hosting you get CDN + HTTPS for free. And you can even use the free tier as long as you want which is awesome for low traffic.
- VertexRed 10y agoI'm going to have to be the boring guy and say: depends completely on how much resources you need. In most cases though (brace yourself for an unpopular opinion) it's enough to setup a simple dedicated server for about $20-$60 per month. Now I did read the comments that mentioned how getting a dedicated server is a waste of valuable time, but honestly you'll most probably be able to get it setup in a day, you'll also learn how web servers work along the way and you won't have to depend on third-party cloud services (yet). Here's a great guide from DigitalOcean on how to setup a modern dedicated HTTP server with MYSQL: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-on-ubuntu-12-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...
- grif-fin 10y agoI can comment on AWS, EC2 (ECS where docker kicks in if you want it). To set it up via UX Amazon Console was absolutely confusing and continues poor user experience until we moved to AWS-cli which was very time consuming and then the setting up of docker which just ate a big chunk of our time. Strongly recommend to go for something simpler and lightweight to reduce the time waste as lots of other comments suggest. At the end of the day you don't even know if anyone wants your product or what first user's opinion is, why waste time on shiny host set-up?
- alauda 10y agoTake a look at hyper.sh, if you are using docker.