I've started working on a side project today but I've been out of the web game for some time and I'm not sure what exactly the options are these days. Do people still use Heroku? AWS λ? Firebase? Digital Ocean? I know this is very much use case dependent but I'm still curious.
I've started to use PaaS (Platform as a service) because it's way more convenient and reduces the headache of getting a simple blog up and running. VPSes are often difficult to harden and many of the recipes online for spinning up servers are not tried and tested and often leave gaping security holes in the installation. At least with PaaS these holes are patched because they are widely deployed on many machines and have to be secure by design. Here's a few to get you started:
It's not quite "hip", but a dedicated server on OVH is pretty sweet. Their WHM/cpanel licences are cheap about 25/month. And you can then run MANY websites/projects all under the same umbrella, instead of each time starting over again with a barebone Digital Ocean droplet/Linode, etc. Plus, you got full power.
Unless you're running some SaaS project, that really needs to be able to scale rapidly -- this is to me still a very solid, simple, worry-free solution.
Btw: with OVH, it comes with 500gb FTP backup, you can add backups to a secondary HD, and you can add other offsite backups, as Amazon S3. Plus, they have a great IP policy, for just a one-time $2, you can get additional IP's, without recurring costs, up to 256 per server: and localised. So you can have 10 USA IP's and 20 Norwegian IP's and 10 Czech IP's all on the same server.
I'm using Linode for apps and Jekyll + AWS (S3 + Route53 + Cloudfront + SSL certs) for static sites. IMO, if you are making simple single-instance apps, Compute Engine or Google Cloud (even Heroku) can be overkill. On one $10 instance of a Linode VPS I can run a back-end REST API, DB and deliver a front-end SPA
In a recent similar thread I found out about scaleway, love it. Cheap, good interface and setting up I found that even the image I used was better set up than the digital ocean one(I just used the python to host a django app)
I'm working on a Node.js app, which'll be hosted on http://xervo.io -- formerly modulus.io
Not as over-engineered as Heroku for small projects, but you still get free LetsEncrypt SSL certs, auto-scaling (for us wishful thinkers), and an integrated/cheap MongoDB (which I haven't messed with). A small side-project runs $7.20/month. I had a good experience with them on a previous Meteor project, so I'm looking forward to using it again.
