How do you host your projects?

Whenever it comes to ramping up a project, I tend to spin up a DigitalOcean droplet (super cheap) for the backend, then host the frontend on Vercel.

My go-to stack right now is SvelteKit + Pocketbase, so getting ramped up between the two is super fast (~5 minutes) and it's very performant starting out.

VPS.

You are not Uber, and most likely will never be. Most people overengineer their infrastructure for the sake of overengineering and dreaming to have 1m users per second. Keep it simple, and CHEAP. Use a VPS

If you are starting, then the use of Back4app would be a free-to-start and economical solution for you. This simple-to-use CSP lets you deploy your projects using a Git repository without any downtime. Similarly, with flexible horizontal and vertical scaling, it also overcomes your concerns regarding scaling.

You can also get more details from here https://www.back4app.com/web-deployment-platform. Realtime DB management, user authentication, push notifications, free-tier plans, and support for technologies like Docker, Redis, NodeJS and PostgreSQL are key traits of this platform.

On the other hand, AWS Amplify and Firebase could also be on your list with seamless hosting and backend functionalities.

• VPS for Backend and Database
• Cloudflare for Frontend

I keep it simple :)

• Frontend: Vercel, Netlify
• Backend: AWS Amplify

I'm using Vercel for frontend and AWS for backend

Agree with you Gyani! No need

Just starting out as indie hacker, but have experience on hosting large projects.
AWS for both, it is very convenient.

I am currently hosting 2 projects with CI/CD, auth, frontend, db, secrets etc. on two aws accounts (dev and prod), i pay like 4-5 bucks per month.

different stages of project hosting within the community and the optimal approaches Like,

1. Getting Started: If you're just diving into your project, simplicity is key. Consider platforms like GitHub or GitLab for version control and project management.
2. Building a User Base: As your project gains momentum and users start signing up, scalability becomes a priority. Cloud hosting services like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure offer scalable infrastructure.
3. Scaling Up: Your project hits scale, it's time to optimize for performance and reliability. Consider containerization with Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes for efficient deployment and scaling.

If you're new to services like AWS or GCP and you need an uncomplicated solution, I suggest checking out Render. Render provides everything you need to host your server, static website, PostgreSQL, and Redis. The best part is that all of these services have a free tier. Previously, I used DigitalOcean, where I had to pay for every service, even if I only needed it for development or staging environments.

I’m using AWS free-tier serverless resources: Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito, CloudFront, etc. It’s free for thousands of active users, scales well, and I don’t need to manage servers, i.e. virtually no downtime. However, it’s harder to configure, but I’m a Devops.
Would you like to hear more about such setup?

A really cheap (and I mean basically free) setup can be done with AWS and Terraform

1. Gitlab/Github for source code
2. Terraform with remote state in an S3 bucket and DynamoDB for state locks
3. AWS Lambda + Python + Docker +FastAPI + Mangum for BE APIs
4. AWS CloudFront + S3 bucket for FE

And thats it. Terraform ensures that you can easily create re-producible environments. The AWS Lambda FastAPI + Mangum combo essentially means you can run an entire FastAPI instance in a Lambda function, which makes the BE basically free until you hit scale. Cloudfront coupled with an S3 bucket is also free until you hit serious traffic.

The above basically scales to infinity (or at least until you run out of lambda invocations) and its dirt cheap

I find that whether you're just starting out or if you have a nice pipeline of users, Vercel & Netlify are good ways to start. Once you hit scale & the pricing for these is less manageable, I usually rely on AWS. I've used SST before and I find it makes working with infrastructure a lot more manageable.

Hey! What you described here is exactly why we created ArchFormation. It builds a cloud infrastructure with DevOps best practices in minutes. We are currently offering a free beta and would greatly appreciate your feedback!

Generally I try to stick with the simplest thing first. The simpler it is, the faster I can build it and get it in the hands of users to see if it's worth exploring further. Modern computers are FAST so you largely won't need to worry about scale until you're making enough money to get a bigger server.

I like to use PaaS like GCP Cloud Run or Digital Ocean App Platform cause it takes care of deployments for me.

You can set up a server for about $5 / m and a database for $12 / m and that'll handle your first few hundred users easily.

Here's how I host my site for less than $1 / m on GCP Cloud Run - https://hamy.xyz/labs/2024-01_how-i-host-site

for my first very small side-projects that only included a static frontend I used Vercel or surge/.sh

now I rent a VPS for 5€ a month, set up Caddy as a file server or reverse proxy and wrote a small script for uploading assets from Github actions via SFTP

With one domain I can host as many side-projects as I want - each under a different subdomain!

I have no experience with scaling yet..

I started using Laravel again for the first time since college. Deploy to Laravel Forge quickly and easily.

I made https://byebyefitness.com with Laravel, every page is just blade templates with very little JS at all.

I'm working on a more interactive/data intensive app and Laravel Breeze is literally a breeze. It is so much easier than creating a react app, API, worrying about coordinating redis, memcached, app server, database etc.

For mobile apps, API Gateway + AWS Lambda for the API.

Digital Ocean has cheaper databases than RDS and it is easier to use.

I found the balance between simplicity & reliability on Cloudflare. They have a generous free plan and are full-stack ready since 2021 – which got tested with time. For the database side, I'm using Planetscale.

And I can't agree more with your statement. At the early stage, we must strive for simplicity and not worry about the infrastructure.

I hope you get an optimal stack for the next project.

Frontend: AWS Amplify
Backend: AWS Amplify or AWS Elastic Beanstalk

I use Vercel and just recently crossed the threshold for the free tier, so now I'm paying $20 per month!
Not sure how long Vercel's pricing will remain sustainable, I might have to switch to Cloudflare or AWS at some point

Using Github for version control with Github Actions for deploying the web in Vercel is pretty much dead simple.

I think vercel could be a good choice for projects using modern frameworks like Next.js…
It's known for its ease of use, speed, and efficiency in deploying static sites and serverless functions. Additionally, its free tier is often more than sufficient for personal projects and small-scale applications.

My projects are websites so i put everything on GitHub Pages. I have like six sites for $5/mo

Vercel for frontend and flyio for backend

I use scripts from my book Deployment from Scratch and Kamal. I wrote down how to use Kamal for a simple single server deployment. And I'll include even more harden configuration to my SaaS template so everyone can start in no time. I self host database too for cost savings.

Host projects on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), PaaS (Heroku, Firebase), dedicated servers (OVH, DigitalOcean), or serverless (Lambda, Azure Functions). Consider project needs, scalability, and cost. See more…

It depends on what you're building. I have split it into diff providers doing different things.
I use Cloudflare Pages to host marketing page, static assets that customers are loading, and whole app. (All that is free)

I use AWS EC2 to host API that APP uses and to handle cronjobs and it also works as a queue consumer from Cloudflare queues.

AWS RDS for MySQL

AWS SES (for email service)

Mailerlite (for marketing communication)

AWS resources you can use free up to 1 year, then you need to subscribe to some service where you can get 5k USD credits for another 2 years, and if you're lucky you can find more and extend to another 2 years. My suggestion would be going by tiers. 1k USD, 5k USD and then 10k USD. Up to 100k, start as low as possible as the next one has to be bigger.

Auth0 for authentication between APP and API (free)

Cloudflare workers to handle super high demand of public api requests combined with cloudflare images and cache API to reduce the costs. Before go live you can use free tier from Cloudflare - it is very generous.

NewRelic for monitoring (free)

So all in all you can basically run free of charge for very long time before you go live. After you go live and start gaining traffic, you will need to beef up a bit with better WAF, servers, load balancing, etc.

Running free will also give you an idea of potential costs later on. For me AWS is very tricky and somewhat hard to predict, it looks good until you have high traffic. So make sure to build your application which would allow you to switch cloud providers. Like digitalocean or go serverless.

Hi Gyani,

My go to is Firebase. It gives me a lot functionalities out of the box to host both web server, app server, cache and database. If you make your projects in JS i.e. reactjs, nodejs + expressjs, then it is a no brainer.

However, for my new project VascoVisa, I am using GCP for app server as it is build using FAST (python3) and firebase does not supports it. However, other components are in firebase

Flask for both backend and frontend, push code to github, pull in a tmux session where you have multiple ttys(one to run the flask server and tail logs, one for database debugging, one for pulling code and misc), run a local database in the same server(take periodic backups to S3).

I'm running 3 servers like the above setup in a single AWS instance, which came with my $1000 free credits. And, I would roughly spend like $10-50 per month I guess, not sure but far less.

P.S: All this ofcourse depends on the load of the computation that you perform. In my case, all are not so compute heavy and data oriented products

https://raspberryrack.com/
https://t.me/PuffBuddyBot/
https://breakingpiracy.com/

BuyVM $2 / server x 2 = $4 / mo
Cloudflare DNS load balancing $5 / mo
GitHub Actions to build a single binary server (Rust backend) $0
SendGrid for EMail $0 free plan
Postgres pgsclusters $7 / month for a managed DB
Domain name registration all-inkl (very cheap German hosting company with 3 free domain names) $5 / mo
Finom Bank Account (free plan) + PayPal = $0

= $26 / month, I have a very long runway until I'd need to be profitable

I tried Kubernetes + Docker, but that would cost me $50 / month ($700 / year vs $312 / year) and it's not worth the hassle at this stage. So I make a single-binary server that just takes a secret config file URL on startup to configure DB connections, etc. It's very unprofessional but very cheap + works just as well as kubernetes as I only push updates infrequently.

On the server I just do curl github/releases/my-server-binary && my-server and then thanks to DNS load balancing the site doesn't go down while I push updates. Since the backend is in Rust it has virtually no performance issues.

I host on netjet

nice

Keep development, testing, staging, and production environments separate.
Use tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation to define and manage infrastructure.
Set up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
Employ monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK stack to identify issues early and improve performance.

Just use firebase hosting, it is free for upto 10,000 concurrent users.

I've tried a few different ways of hosting some of my projects. Vercel, Netlify, I even dabbled with AWS Amplify.

For my project TinySurvey, I settled on Cloudflare Pages/Workers using Supabase to host the database and handle the auth.

There were a few reasons I chose Cloudflare over Vercel/AWS:

• It's really fast to load. This was a requirement for me as I wanted the surveys and dashboard data to be quick to load.
• It works well with NextJS which is what's powering TinySurvey
• There's a generous free tier, and from what I can see isn't crazy expensive as it scales
• It's been easy to set up. I was up and running in a few hours with only a few small changes I needed to make to my project (changing to the edge runtime for example)

It's been great so far for the early stage of my project!