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I migrated the landing pages for my app[1] from Nextjs to Astrojs mainly because I was paying Vercel $20 per month for serving static pages(it’s 4 times more th

I migrated the landing pages for my app[1] from Nextjs to Astrojs mainly because I was paying Vercel $20 per month for serving static pages(it’s 4 times more than I pay Railway for the Postgres database for the actual app and also 4 times more than I pay Cloudflare for hosting all my apps). I used AI for migrating and it took a few days only as the existing repo was used as “instructions” and it included some upgrades and improvements here and there. [1]: https://www.sqlai.ai/ https://www.sqlai.ai/

christoff12 6mo ago
this is neat
xandrius 6mo ago
Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day? Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.
- kami23 6mo ago
  I just did this over at Hetzner and Claude admins it for me so I don't need to learn the CLI or anything, describe the proxying I want, and it setups up a bunch of small side project pages for me.
  - xandrius 6mo ago
    For me I always default to UpCloud, great team and great services. From Finland!
  - kamikazeturtles 6mo ago
    How do you use Claude to admin it? Does Claude SSH into the server and do everything or just write bash scripts?
    - mdrzn 6mo ago
      ssh into the VPS and launch ClaudeCode directly on the machine, so it has full access
- skydhash 6mo ago
  No click-ops that way.
  - xandrius 6mo ago
    To be fair, I never have to click anything either since it's via SSH :D
- kennu 6mo ago
  It means you take responsibility of maintaining the server forever, i.e. dealing with TLS certificates, SSH keys, security updates, OS/package updates, monitoring, reboots when stuck, redeploy when VPS retired, etc. Usually things work fine for a year or two and then stuff starts to get old and need attention and eat your time.
  - shimman 6mo ago
    This is extremely easy with tools like dokploy tho... I use dokploy locally to manage all my VPSs + home server. Truly good stuff and I don't believe your quip at the end, it feels like poisoning the open source waters for consolidated anti democratic cloud platforms. It's way way way way easier managing a basic VPS that can be highly performant for your needs. If this was 2010, I'd agree with you but tooling and practices have gotten so much better over the last decade (especially the last 5 years).
    - kennu 6mo ago
      Maybe you're right - I've never tried dokploy, but from documentation it sounds like mostly a deployment, monitoring and alerting tool. For me the problem has always been that once you get the alert (or something just stops working), a human needs to react to it and make things work again. In cloud services you mostly pay for them providing the human, and in self-hosting you're the human. I can see though that today's AI models could eventually replace the human in the loop and truly automatically fix every possible situation.
      - c-hendricks 6mo ago
        I must be using the wrong cloud services. Whenever a part of our app goes down someone on the team still needs to respond to it.
        bdangubic 6mo ago
        you actually need new ops teammates, not new cloud services :)
- mbesto 6mo ago
  Or a homelab using Proxmox or Unraid.
- cornholio 6mo ago
  I don't even bother setting up VPS instances by hand. If you have gmail then you have access to Google Cloud, and they offer a free tier of Cloud Run that comfortably covers anything you might do on a personal project. You basically create a github, put a dockerfile inside it with your nginx config, frontend files, backend etc., then push and the Cloud Run instance is built for you then deployed into production. By default you are paying only for active requests, when a http request hits your box GCP will wake it up, charge for the CPU time used for serving it, then leave it idle for free for about 15 minutes. If another hit comes in that interval, you have instantaneous response because the instance is warm, otherwise it will wake up again and see a few seconds of latency (ie. during the night, when you have few visitors etc). It also scales up automatically if you have substantial traffic, you don't have to do anything other than design your application so that multiple instances hitting the same data storage (ex. Firestore) will play nice. It of course handles all security, versioning, HTTPS certs etc. for you, you are simply serving plain HTTP traffic within the GCP internal network and just make sure your own application (what you push to git) is secure. The things you pay for are outbound traffic (for obvious reasons like warez etc.) as well as storage of docker images (Artifact registry, i think you only have 0.5GB free, about 3 alpine images), but you can easily set up a rule to auto-delete old images. Overall, you can run a small business with daily/weekly updates for less than a dollar a month and hit 5 nines availability, which you will never achieve for a self-administered VPS. Sorry if it sounds like an advertisement, but it's just enormous value for a small builder.
  - xandrius 6mo ago
    I still think you described using a VPS but with a tons of extra steps, expenses and then being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past. You get a generic VPS and you can do whatever the hell you like, not paying bigG for some "obvious reasons" like outbound traffic. And a small business will never need 5 nines availability, that's just the propaganda from big tech to over engineer and pay them for that. You can run a small/medium business and be offline for 1 hour every day (makes it 95.8%) and still be fine. It's when you're worldwide and not that small that you want better availability. Also, you know all those AWS outages? My VPSs were never impacted to the slightest!

christoff12 6mo ago

this is neat

xandrius 6mo ago

Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day? Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.

kami23 6mo ago
I just did this over at Hetzner and Claude admins it for me so I don't need to learn the CLI or anything, describe the proxying I want, and it setups up a bunch of small side project pages for me.
- xandrius 6mo ago
  For me I always default to UpCloud, great team and great services. From Finland!
- kamikazeturtles 6mo ago
  How do you use Claude to admin it? Does Claude SSH into the server and do everything or just write bash scripts?
  - mdrzn 6mo ago
    ssh into the VPS and launch ClaudeCode directly on the machine, so it has full access
skydhash 6mo ago
No click-ops that way.
- xandrius 6mo ago
  To be fair, I never have to click anything either since it's via SSH :D
kennu 6mo ago
It means you take responsibility of maintaining the server forever, i.e. dealing with TLS certificates, SSH keys, security updates, OS/package updates, monitoring, reboots when stuck, redeploy when VPS retired, etc. Usually things work fine for a year or two and then stuff starts to get old and need attention and eat your time.
- shimman 6mo ago
  This is extremely easy with tools like dokploy tho... I use dokploy locally to manage all my VPSs + home server. Truly good stuff and I don't believe your quip at the end, it feels like poisoning the open source waters for consolidated anti democratic cloud platforms. It's way way way way easier managing a basic VPS that can be highly performant for your needs. If this was 2010, I'd agree with you but tooling and practices have gotten so much better over the last decade (especially the last 5 years).
  - kennu 6mo ago
    Maybe you're right - I've never tried dokploy, but from documentation it sounds like mostly a deployment, monitoring and alerting tool. For me the problem has always been that once you get the alert (or something just stops working), a human needs to react to it and make things work again. In cloud services you mostly pay for them providing the human, and in self-hosting you're the human. I can see though that today's AI models could eventually replace the human in the loop and truly automatically fix every possible situation.
    - c-hendricks 6mo ago
      I must be using the wrong cloud services. Whenever a part of our app goes down someone on the team still needs to respond to it.
      - bdangubic 6mo ago
        you actually need new ops teammates, not new cloud services :)
mbesto 6mo ago
Or a homelab using Proxmox or Unraid.
cornholio 6mo ago
I don't even bother setting up VPS instances by hand. If you have gmail then you have access to Google Cloud, and they offer a free tier of Cloud Run that comfortably covers anything you might do on a personal project. You basically create a github, put a dockerfile inside it with your nginx config, frontend files, backend etc., then push and the Cloud Run instance is built for you then deployed into production. By default you are paying only for active requests, when a http request hits your box GCP will wake it up, charge for the CPU time used for serving it, then leave it idle for free for about 15 minutes. If another hit comes in that interval, you have instantaneous response because the instance is warm, otherwise it will wake up again and see a few seconds of latency (ie. during the night, when you have few visitors etc). It also scales up automatically if you have substantial traffic, you don't have to do anything other than design your application so that multiple instances hitting the same data storage (ex. Firestore) will play nice. It of course handles all security, versioning, HTTPS certs etc. for you, you are simply serving plain HTTP traffic within the GCP internal network and just make sure your own application (what you push to git) is secure. The things you pay for are outbound traffic (for obvious reasons like warez etc.) as well as storage of docker images (Artifact registry, i think you only have 0.5GB free, about 3 alpine images), but you can easily set up a rule to auto-delete old images. Overall, you can run a small business with daily/weekly updates for less than a dollar a month and hit 5 nines availability, which you will never achieve for a self-administered VPS. Sorry if it sounds like an advertisement, but it's just enormous value for a small builder.
- xandrius 6mo ago
  I still think you described using a VPS but with a tons of extra steps, expenses and then being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past. You get a generic VPS and you can do whatever the hell you like, not paying bigG for some "obvious reasons" like outbound traffic. And a small business will never need 5 nines availability, that's just the propaganda from big tech to over engineer and pay them for that. You can run a small/medium business and be offline for 1 hour every day (makes it 95.8%) and still be fine. It's when you're worldwide and not that small that you want better availability. Also, you know all those AWS outages? My VPSs were never impacted to the slightest!