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Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?
I'm a solo dev working on both my own apps and a product as part of a small team. I'm interested to hear how others are running their apps?
- Self hosted on a VPS?
- Managed infrastructure like AWS, Fly, Render, Digital Ocean App Platform, GCP?
- Full-stack platform like Vercel, Firebase, Supabase?
- eru2 2y agoCurrently using heroku for a backend server for an app I'm working on, in the past I've played with a lot of different options, but most of them are too complicated and expensive if you don't actually have paying users.
- anso_cc 2y ago1GB RAM DigitalOcean VPS
- codehooks 2y agoNetlify for front-end and codehooks.io for the backend.
- TobbenTM 2y agoFully managed so I can spend my time on actually building features. In my case, AWS is my go to cloud, and even with a couple of thousand users, Lambda for compute, DynamoDB for database and SNS+SQS for eventing is costing me less than 5€ per month. Yes, there are risks with serverless if you get DDOSed or whatever, but it’s a risk I’m fine with, and can mitigate with gateways in front if necessary. And Lambdas are not locking me in to AWS since I’m running “full” ASP.Net apps in them, so hosting them on actual compute platforms is an easy switch.
- aosaigh 2y agoInteresting. Did you migrate to a serverless architecture or was your app serverless from the start?
- TobbenTM 2y agoIt was serverless from the start, although there isn't a whole lot of serverless unique code in it, apart from some event handler bootstrapping to handle SQS triggered Lambdas. Everything else is just standard .Net that would look the same no matter where it's hosted. Huge fan of separating infrastructure concerns from the rest of the app to not lock yourself in so much.
- romanhn 2y agoVery similar tech stack here, with all the same motivations. Biggest differences are I'm using RDS for the database and have a slightly different approach for serverless compute. I started out with Lambda, but the cold start times were bugging me so I moved production hosting to App Runner, which is the next best thing (eliminates cold start without breaking the wallet). Kept staging environment on Lambda. Also using the "fat lambda" approach with ASP.NET apps, so no lock-in here. Spending about $35/mo total - RDS is the biggest contributor, then App Runner and other small things. I also have an SSR app for the homepage which required some dynamic functionality. Basic Node app hosted in a Cloudflare worker essentially for free, hitting the App Runner hosted API for data.
- tmitchel2 2y agoSnap, I'm using CDK to set it all up too which makes everything pretty easy to manage.
- FKFnwL 2y agoI'm using Modal (modal.com). Works with my Python heavy stack.
- nicbou 2y agoDocker on a DigitalOcean VPS. I've never been a fan of managed stuff, but then again I'm mostly coding for fun, not because it's the best use of my time.
- pestatije 2y agoim considering Railway due to not requiring credit card, but have not decided yet so cannot tell if its good or not
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mbrain 2y agoDokku on a Hetzner instance, can handle 10s of apps if I need. Very simple to setup and manage. Deploys with git push.
- leros 2y agoI host some very small things on Firebase but I'm mostly using Render for projects these days (I switched from Heroku)
- is_true 2y agoVPS + Cloudflare CDN, R2 and Workers
- kaliara 2y agoRender has been a great heroku replacement. I thought I would miss the “add-ons marketplace” but it’s actually been fine. Costs are reasonable for our startup and they seemed to have fixed their odd Cloudflare downtimes of the past.
- nocommandline 2y agoI try to stick to serverless rather than trying to manage any infrastructure 1) Google App Engine Standard. Datastore for DB. 2) For anything that won’t work with the above, then it’s Google Cloud Run
- rozenmd 2y agoAWS for the important stuff: DB, core services Cloudflare/Vercel for the UI Increasingly moving the important stuff to Cloudflare
- auspex 2y agoELB with WAF -> Fargate -> RDS
- otmahthe 2y agoSo, I've found that a mix of VPS / Cloud is great for me. I have VPSs with Ionos, they're cheap and for the rest its all over GCP, functions, scheduler, firestore, storage, CDN and Cloud run are convenient tools. Namecheap for domains, feels reliable. Maybe switching to Hetzner for VPS if I need bigger ones, feels reliable and good priced.
- qeternity 2y agoRancher k8s + Helm charts for HA services (Redis Sentinel + Patroni Postgres). Nightly snapshot backups + streaming Postgres WAL segments to S3. I’ve never understood the k8s hate. We have been running this for a few years and it is rock solid. We can bring the entire cluster up on any provider anywhere in the world in about an hour. The DR is great.
- Talkative32 2y ago[flagged]
- bravetraveler 2y agoCombination of labs, colo, and partnerships with other parties. Varying types of platforms and degrees of control. Ansible is the most unanimous thing I can name
- zackify 2y agoFly.io. One command and it’s in another region, with my data thanks to litefs. It works great for my read heavy e-commerce app
- hyldmo 2y agoExtremely happy with supabase here, it has mostly eliminated the need for a backend, letting me just focus on making valuable stuff for my users. I also ended up making my entire app realtime just because it was easier
- blockwriter 2y agoVercel after moving away from Docker containers running on AWS.
- eddd-ddde 2y agoWhat are the advantages of Vercel over Cloudflare pages?
- distortionfield 2y agoMy setup is a digital ocean box with docker compose scripts and watchtower for deploys. All I have to do is push a new image and it will deploy in prod. Database is as aged Postgres cause that’s all that is really important. Cloudflare for the smaller services.
- eitchugo 2y agoSelf-hosted on a VPS is the first option for me, it's cheap and you have total control on everything. It's valid in my case because I know my way through infrastructure and configuration, so a panel isn't too much gain. You sometimes can even get those for free - https://free-for.dev/#/?id=major-cloud-providers https://free-for.dev/#/?id=major-cloud-providers For example, I have some (really) free instances on Oracle Cloud that I host pages, experiments, and so many things.
- clay_the_ripper 2y agoNetlify for the front-end, google cloud for extended storage and Akamai for hosting. Akamai is great as they are less customizable than AWS (which is a good thing if you don’t need extra config) and much less expensive.
- felipemesquita 2y agoWe have our own servers (mostly consumer pc parts) and run lxd to slice them up into vms/containers. Deploy to those using kamal and expose the web server port through cloudflare tunnels. With simple scripts to periodically compress and upload the storage volumes and database dumps to Google drive, most of our less critical apps cost about $0 to keep running. For the higher criticality apps, we also deploy them to Linux vms using kamal, but use a commercial service (linode).
- davidguetta 2y agoIs there a better option than heroku for under 10$ a month for python app and db support ?
- bckr 2y agoRender is great but is more like $20 a month for app and managed Postgres
- aristofun 2y agoHetzner + docker swarm can take you long way for a fraction of cost of any next alternative And for a fraction of a mental burden and stress of the lightest k8s setup you can imagine
- quectophoton 2y agoI did something like this for a while when I was messing around with my personal website, but with one node in Hetzner and other in Linode. It was a really nice way of managing services without bringing a full kitchen sink factory factory. The only thing I found lacking was an easy way to share volumes across nodes. There's plugins and stuff, but for me it was not worth the effort. I ended up just ditching Linode and having everything in a single Hetzner VPS. I can do this because it was mostly experimenting and didn't really need to have more than one server. But for this specific case, the volumes thing was what ended up tipping the balance in favor of only having a single server because it wasn't worth the effort.
- aristofun 2y agoHow often solopreneurs can’t get away with just 1 beefy machine? Or at least with just 1 vps provider to share extra volumes
- aristofun 2y agoI run 2 rails websites with hundreds of real daily users on a single shared 2cpu/2gb vps, inlcuding 1 staging env, postgres db, memcache for caching.
- from-nibly 2y agoBuy some used servers on eBay, at least 3 will do for redundancy, then get 2 internet connections. Set up another server to act as your opnsense firewall/router and bond the two internet connections together. Make sure to buy a pair of UPSs for power back up. Install kubernetes and rook ceph with about 12 hard drives (redundancy) then find a friend who can host another server for offside backups. Dont forget the tape drive system for your second media. Start deploying gittea so you can host your code. Use argocd so you can have a build system. Deploy dapr so you can host all of your microservices in a standard way. Deploy otel and alertmanager so you can hook it into the only cloud service you need: OpsGenie (don't forget to winge the whole time you use it) That way you can write an article about how much cheaper self hosting is compared to the cloud and get your next round of investment. On a serious note. The next startup I do I'm going to just use supabase.
- happytoexplain 2y agoOnly about 10% of this comes off as sarcastic in the context of HN.
- flemhans 2y agoJust one server and skip the redundancy. Then it's kinda manageable
- j45 2y agoSelf-hosting using FTTH is many orders of magnitude more stable than home based internet used to be. A lot of the description above can be run pretty easily with Proxmox, which itself is a web based gui to setup said redundancy (even can run it as hybrid cloud with failover to the major cloud providers). This approach can greatly simplify and reduce dependency formation on one cloud service in particular.
- ivorbuk 2y agoS3 buckets for the SPA's, AWS Lambda, API Gateway and EC2 for a MySQL instance. Some SQS to help with orchestration of the operational stuff. Have about 5k MAU and total cost barely breaks 40$ a month. Chose this because it's the stack I'm super familiar with.
- bckr 2y agoRender. Happy with it for now as a prototyping / MVP tool. Won’t be able to continue forever due to HIPAA requirements and not sure how it scales anyway.
- lappet 2y agoThis is not for a business, but I am working on a side project that uses node.js + sqlite and the entire stack will run on a single Lightsail instance ($5 per month)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- MrLeap 2y agoSteam! No server at all save that.
- ivylee 2y agoFor static web apps like my portfolio and blog[1], I use GitHub+Netlify. I try to use AWS Lambdas as serverless backend as much as possible, for API products like [2]. If a server is absolutely required like running a Ghost blog/newsletter [3], I use AWS Lightsail mainly because I'm familiar with AWS in general and it offers generous free tier. [1]: https://ivylee.github.io/ https://ivylee.github.io/ [2]: https://www.ycverify.com/ https://www.ycverify.com/ [3]: https://www.signalstalk.com/ https://www.signalstalk.com/
- dieselgate 2y ago“rails s” on a droplet
- jakubmazanec 2y agoFly.io + EdgeDB cloud.
- dave333 2y agoHosted a few small but profitable web sites on Hostgator since 2005 - cheap and no need to worry about infrastructure beyond hosting files. Only problems have been wordpress sites getting hacked.
- anotherhue 2y agoCloud offerings are incredible for small teams. Don't even bother trying to do your own thing until you can clearly articulate the savings and factor in the risks and costs. Odds are you'll never need to move.
- derfabianpeter 2y agoSpoiler: Shameless plug, but might be helpful for people I understand most of the commentators, as well as OP, are probably looking to not spend too much time and money on their hosting infra. While that makes sense in the beginning, there might be a point in your successful journey where you want to hand over your operation duties to someone skilled and focus on building software because your business starts depending on safe and well-maintained infrastructure. If you're looking for something between Heroku and AWS (both in terms of pricing and scalability) but based on K8s, with direct access to skilled platform engineers and personal support, you might want to check out https://www.ayedo.de/cloud/ https://www.ayedo.de/cloud/
- yencabulator 2y agoCloudflare Workers and Fly.io
- XCSme 2y agoI use Coolify on Hetzner bare metal. I still like individual VPSs, as I have more control over the cost, monitoring, backups, etc.