I have a small idea that I am hacking on and was wondering what would be the current recommendation if I don't want to use one of those large cloud providers.
I have no JavaScript, only HTML and CSS files and a few Clojure files which run the API.
Linode is great. Wonderful options, reliable, excellent tools. Been using them for almost a decade.
It's hard to beat Netlify and Vercel for static content. They make it easy and you'll be up and running in seconds.
I know you said Clojure, but it's worth mentioning: if you do choose to make a JavaScript/TypeScript backend, Vercel + Next.js's API routes is a great option. With that combination you'll have a GitHub integrated CI/CD build (if you need it) and serverless functions behind a custom domain with SSL in minutes.
I've been running a small site for 10 years or so, I can't remember any significant issue. I've had uptimes of years, broken by me updating something on the host.
+1 vote for Hetzner. They don't do a lot of things compared to AWS etc., but the things they do are rock-solid at unbeatable prices. The only downside (depending on your place of residence) is that they only have data centers in Germany and Sweden.
And I like to give them kudos when I see Digital Ocean mentioned. I run a business in Puerto Rico, and host our ERP and some other services with DO.
After Hurricane Maria in 2017, I wrote off island suppliers asking for any support they could give. DO write back very quickly crediting us 3 months of hosting based on our prior billing.
And besides, the rep sent a very nicely written note wishing us the best. It was a very human response. Good people to do business with.
Their documentation is good. I’m not a DO user but it’s one of those places you stumble upon sometimes when googling. A bit like how you always end up reading the Arch wiki regardless of which distro you use
Also a DO customer here, both personally and as a company all our infra runs on DO. I really like it except that the management platform is pretty slow and not very searchable which is annoying. Other than that it's great (and I prefer it vastly to AWS).
I don't remember exactly. I've been with them since early 2005s, and some time later there was a change back in the days on this. I used to pay them 5$/month with discount for a year.
They're very good, I must've been a customer for 12+ years already and it's always been pleasant.
I like Digital Ocean the most these days, but other good options are Linode and Hetzner (which is especially good option for us Europeans). Digital Ocean has a great UI, managed databases, S3 alternative object storage, block storage, and more.
After struggling to keep VPSs up to date with security patches for small sites, I've become a fan of shared hosting again. When I was a teen I hosted my sites with Pair.com, and they still have an excellent record and provide full shell access.
If your really want a VPS, they also provide an inexpensive fully managed VPS solution.
I got really tired of keeping the OS and patches up to date; I just want to get to coding. I also hate CPanel-based hosting.
I believe Pair.com is a good solution when you don't want an unmanaged VPS but you don't want to pay for Heroku et al either.
They're based in PA, though. So probably not the best if you're in the West coast.
I don't see anyone saying Scaleway so far. It's a cool, simple cloud. New services are showing up all the time, but it's still VERY simple compared to AWS or Azure. Also I find their pricing invoicing very clear.
New services are often free for testing, sometimes even afterwards (their S3 is still first 75GB free).
I love documentation and web UI of Digital Ocean, but find their pricing a bit to high for tiny projects. Linode is also amazing.
Linode, and let me tell you why... I had an unimportant side project running on a Linode VPS. I left it running, almost forgot about it and wasn't checking emails associated with that account. When I did check that email account, Linode has been trying to contact me about my VPS getting compromised and it was running a bot of some sort. It was probably 4-6 months before I saw their emails. All they did was cut off network access to my VPS, so I had to use their virtual console to log in and take care of things.
I appreciated the way they took the minimal action necessary that isolated the problem, instead of just nuking my entire account, and all its data, like I read that Digital Ocean did in a similar situation, only it wasn't an unimportant side project, it was someone's entire ongoing business. I have no affiliation with Linode except being a satisfied customer, but this experience this is why Linode is my first choice, all else being equal.
I really like DigitalOcean for this but you might feel they are too big but they are not MS/AWS/GCP
I feel digital ocean gets out of your way. AWS especially feels like you are in an AWS rabbit hole for a lot of stuff. After spending an hour trying figuring out how to give a specific IAM user read write access to a bucket. I said fuck it and just decided not to use S3 to backup my Wordpress site
Google Cloud Run will the quickest to start with, most scalable and least expensive in the short run.
Vultr is all you'll need for inexpensive and reliable VMs. My experience with Vultr has been much better than Linode and DigitalOcean. RamNode is also great in terms of performance.
Been hearing good things about Render's unified cloud too. Worth checking out.
I know you said no large cloud provider, but seriously consider Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for your needs. You can host all your web services and APIs for free lifelong under the free tier limits (and yes its truly free no hidden cost like AWS or GCP) Check out the free tier offering and you won't be disappointed.
Counterpoint - they killed my free lifelong stuff after a couple months.
I suspect their underlying tech and specs are decent but everything around it was just shockingly bad.
Maybe it’s changed since - more clouds are good. Suspect I got the early beta experience of their free trial…but still left a bad taste in my mouth. Which takes some doing when handing out free stuff
Something about their signups didn’t trust me — I had to get an account through a sales rep, but I’ve been using the free plan for personal stuff fine for about a year.
I think it may have been just that phase...they changed their rules around always free multiple times within about a month & kicked a bunch of people off not just me.
Quite plausible that it has settled down since, because I don't think it was ready for public yet at the time.
Can't give the trial another chance though given that it's a once off
Just a little note: if you are using clojure then you’ll need your machine set up with Java. That’s the important consideration here; it’s not relevant whether you’re using javascript or not because that’s all sent to the client’s web browser (doesn’t run on your server)
I use Vultr for all my projects. Currently running a VPS for my personal Wordpress blog, another VPS for wikijs, and a third VPS with Caprover that runs a handful of microservices. Vultr has a splendid UX that I really appreciate.
You can also start with LightSail if you plan to extend it with other AWS features in the future (such as S3). It's a direct competition to Digital Ocean, Linode etc but on Amazon's infrastructure.
It is better to avoid the giants (Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc.) for small projects as they are too much of a hassle (trying to figure out what you will be billed for) and even expensive. Someone on HN had mentioned once that these large providers make sense, and are affordable, only if you are spending more than $5000 on your existing hosting already. I feel that is a very apt advice.
As for which host to choose, this was the advice I had got 10+ years back, and it still holds true:
1. Check how long they have been in business: You want to look for stability in a hosting company. Older hosts means they have a more stable business and more experience.
2. Check their reputation and support: Do they take their security seriously, have they ever been breached? How is their support - will they respond quickly to your needs?
3. Verify if they run their own data centres: Many small webhosting companies are resellers that just hire servers or instances from other larger providers and manage the software. Or some just resell a white label service while everything is managed by the larger host company.
4. Check if they "oversell": A server can serve only so many instances of a VPS or website. Many webhosting companies oversell the resources they have on the gamble that not all their clients will use the full resource they are buying. If you are running a business you don't want that kind of uncertainity when you expect to scale.
5. Check if they offer the tech you need: FreeBSD servers used to be really popular once, now Linux servers are the rage. Or you may prefer Windows for your .net app. Or even an Oracle DB (if you have money to burn unnecessarily). Or you may prefer a specific version of an OS / DB / software for a particular web app or SaaS you have developed. Different hosts offer different technology. Verify your requirement with the webhost before you commit to them.
Apart from these, other things one may want to consider - if you want "managed service" (where the hosting company manages your software - installation and updation of system software, monitoring your servers etc.) or "unmanaged services" (where you are the system and db admin and monitor and manage the server instance). Or if you want data centres in a particular geographical location. Or if they offer the kind of billing cycle you want and so on. You may also want to find out how generous they are when you hit the server limits of your paid plans - do they shut down your instance without warning, or do they allow an exception for the rare unexpected peak in traffic and resources when your website is slashdotted or appears on HN?
The usual US based hosts that were then highly recommended, based on these ideas, for small projects were:
- Pair (www.pair.com - one of the oldest competent small-to-medium webhosting companies)
- Linode (www.linode.com - came much later, but gained a lot of reputation with their affordable unmanaged VPS hosting services and the easy platform they offered to manage them.)
Having tried all 3, I still personally prefer and recommend Pair and Linode.
Later Digital Ocean (www.digitalocean.com) and Vultr (www.vultr.com) arrived on the scene with more competitive pricing and better hardware and tech than Linode (for a while). DigitalOcean is also good and seems to have gained a good reputation so far. Rackspace lost the interest of the hobbyist crowd when they started focusing more on corporate clients.
If you have an API to run, put it in a container. Bundle the HTML/CSS in the container. Pick a provider that will run a container for you without you needing to maintain a virtual machine or server. (I don't have any non-AWS suggestions, but AWS Fargate and Lambda both work well with containers)
It's hard to beat Netlify and Vercel for static content. They make it easy and you'll be up and running in seconds.
I know you said Clojure, but it's worth mentioning: if you do choose to make a JavaScript/TypeScript backend, Vercel + Next.js's API routes is a great option. With that combination you'll have a GitHub integrated CI/CD build (if you need it) and serverless functions behind a custom domain with SSL in minutes.