

Ask HN: Where would you host a quickly bootstrapped site? - mkaziz

I&#x27;ve been using heroku recently, but am wondering as to alternatives people use. This is just for hobbyist development and I&#x27;m fairly cost-conscious at the moment.
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saluki
Digital Ocean is great for small projects . . . and it's nice to you can host
multiple projects on one droplet.

If you're using Laravel check out
[https://forge.laravel.com/](https://forge.laravel.com/).

It makes it super easy to get up and running on Digital Ocean and
[http://laravel.com/docs/homestead](http://laravel.com/docs/homestead)
provides a quick and easy VM to match what forge sets up on Digital Ocean.

Plus it's easy to setup multiple small projects on the same droplet. Forge is
$10/mo but it supports Laravel and does save time setting up and configuring
Digital Ocean along with easy deployment.

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akg_67
Host it on Digital Ocean. You can host multiple projects on same Droplet. When
the traffic/load picks up for one project and can't be handled on one droplet,
you can spin it out to a separate droplet. When load increases further,
upgrade the droplet to larger expensive plan.

I started out with $5 droplet for my projects. Now one of my project that
gained traction is on $10 droplet and rest still on $5 droplet.

Personally I avoid any PaaS/IaaS that require custom development hooks
specific to their platforms to maintain my operational and hosting
flexibility.

~~~
dennybritz
I still don't quite understand the value proposition behind DO and why people
have started using it over AWS. So far I understand that it has a nice
interface and is a bit (but not much) cheaper for certain server
configurations. But that can't be all, right?

Could anyone explain why DO is becoming so popular?

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akg_67
AWS is akin to building your car by buying and installing one part at a time.
DO is akin to buying a Honda Fit. AWS is good when you got Cadillac budget.
AWS has a sweet spot. When your needs are too small or too large, AWS is not
the right solution.

AWS integration is complex due to multitude of services priced separately and
need to be integrated separately. For early stage projects, this creates
unnecessary complexity. The costs of these services quickly add up too.

As you embed more and more AWS services into your projects, you become locked
in and unable to migrate off quickly. That is when AWS tells you to bend over
and empty your pockets. You lose flexibility to move.

I have primarily investigated minimal of services on AWS and DO and found DO
to better and quickly fit my needs.

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Jake232
DigitalOcean, spend a couple of hours getting a server setup that covers your
general stack and then save it as an image. Then in the future you can just
boot a new server on that image for $5 p/m.

~~~
schmidtc
I 2nd DO. I haven't found anything else that beats the price. I'm moving all
my stuff there from Amazon.

If you can swing a static+javascript. Hosting on github pages seems to be
popular, or AWS S3+CDN.

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vishalchandra
Static website: S3 on AWS, Web app: Digital Ocean (can support multiple apps
too, run Nginx on the same machine)

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hashtag
Linode. It's the host I currently use.

