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Allison Seboldt
Allison Seboldt

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What hosting do you use?

From orchestrating containers to "serverless" to doing it all yourself with an ansible script and a $5 DO droplet, the options for hosting websites and apps have changed considerably in the past decade.

What method do you use for putting stuff on the internet? Am I "old school" for thinking I still need to install and configure a server myself?

Top comments (29)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

DEV is hosted on Heroku.

docs.dev.to is hosted on Netlify

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

TIL docs.dev.to exists. Nice!

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allison_seboldt profile image
Allison Seboldt

I used Heroku this past year for my fantasy congress app and it was so expensive! But, I had a lot of jobs to run in the background which is where I think they got me.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yeah Heroku can be expensive if you're not careful (or even if you are). For us we have much bigger expenses than the raw Heroku bill so it hasn't been worth over-optimizing yet.

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Sean Anderson

I use Azure now but I abused the hell out of HostGator for years serving 5TB+ of downloads a month on their "unlimited" shared hosting plan. Before HostGator I used another unlimited shared hosting provider but got kicked off cause...5TB+ a month and my traffic/php CPU cycles were shutting down other sites. Azure egress is not cheap so I redirect the file downloads to another site (mediafire.com) that displays ads but nonetheless serves my files to users for free. They are getting a bad deal I can assure you. My ads paid me about $100-200 a month and Azure charges far more than that for 5TB a month.

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Bernard Chhun

Like most general questions, the sane answer is "it depends" :)

I personnally use a mix of those based on:

  • what I'm working on
  • who I'm working for

Examples:

  • for tutorials and demo nodejs apps, I love using glitch.com/ aka serverless.
  • for a client that has a legacy app connected to a mainframe-based ERP, I'll use whatever the client is using and automate the parts I can automate.
  • for long term personal projects, I've been loving and using webfaction.com/ and digitalocean.com/ with ansible
  • for projects at my workplace, it's AWS and chef all the way.

With that said, all those tools are abstractions of configuring stuff yourself, so what do you want to abstract away ?

Do you feel the need to do it ? Or does it come from peer pressure ?

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allison_seboldt profile image
Allison Seboldt

"It depends" is always the case with software. I want to get a feel for what's popular. Maybe try something new that I haven't considered.

What do you do at work with AWS? I dabbled with lambda but felt it was restrictive.

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bchhun profile image
Bernard Chhun • Edited

Aws Lambda is a lightweight compute solution, so it's not its goal to do cpu intensive things.

We're using the following AWS products:

  • route 51 for DNS configurations
  • EC2 for backend apps
  • S3 for static files storage
  • Cognito for user sign-up, sign-in, and access control

We're also using netlify.com/ to deploy our frontend/SPA apps.

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F Ξ R Λ L • Edited

Digital ocean for low traffic projects that don't need to scale.

Google cloud App Engine for services that are used intermittently, and Google static hosting for mostly everything else in between.

I'm CHEAP lol

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Adrian B.G.

Personal: Google cloud (appengine and VM) for back end stuff, I am very happy with it. I used AWS but their UI is too awful and not that cheap.

Github Pages, AWS S3 and blackblaze (is like dropbox but with open HTTP) for static hosting with CloudFlare as CDN.

I am too pragmatic and hate doing ops so everything is managed or dockerized.

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Tommy May III • Edited

I use digital ocean for most things, but have been exploring other options. I have found that other options are way more expensive and it's hard for me to give up the flexibility of doing whatever I want on a DO droplet.

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jordan33h profile image
Jordan

Money matters, but I can see DO really providing a good platform (Space, K8s .Etc) for small developers like me, which is very sufficient.

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Avalander

I use Digital Ocean mostly. Every now and then I try other solutions, but I haven't found any option that I like better yet.

I'm not fond of solutions where I have to learn a CLI API or, even worse, a specific web UI to configure and deploy my applications, I'd much rather have direct ssh access to a VPS.

I do use AWS at work, like every other backend developer out there, but I wouldn't choose any serverless solution for a personal project.

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allison_seboldt profile image
Allison Seboldt

Yeah this is kind of where I'm at too.

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Todd Stark II

Most of my personal stuff is on DO. I have also been playing around with GCP for one project. I haven't done much with it yet, but I like the simplicity of it's UI, at least compared to AWS. I'm also intrigued by their use of chromeOS as a server OS. I don't have a ton of experience with it, I just like playing with different OS's.

At work, we're all AWS. AWS does a lot of things right, and they have a ton of features, but I feel that their UI leaves a lot to be desired, and their documentation is a bit hard to navigate, for lack of a better term. I can usually find a solution to whatever problem I'm trying to solve, but it takes longer than I think it should.

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Timothy Cole • Edited

I use Google Cloud Platform (*GCP) for both personal and work (Social Blade).

For personal stuff I deploy things to GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) and store data in Datastore.

For work we use many different GCP products. 🙂

  • 2 App Engine Services
    • 2 Instances
  • 4 Compute Instance Groups
    • 17 Instances in groups
    • 16 Instances no in groups
  • 3 Cloud Functions
  • 8 Storage Buckets
  • 6 Cloud MySQL Databases

We do plan on moving our Instance Grouped Compute instances into App Engine Service soon™ to easier management and we plan on moving from Cloud MySQL to Google Spanner in the coming months

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Hussein Al Hammad

I often work with a PHP stack. For clients projects I like to use Cloudways. It's managed cloud hosting; so you can host on Digital Ocean/Vultr/linode via Cloudways.

It is very much on the expensive side, but the features make it worth it for clients.

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Ace Eldeib

If I'm experimenting and want a VM, DO is my go-to because their UI is so clean. I haven't dabbled with their CLI/SDK tooling at all, but I would like to. I saw they have some Go bindings to libvirt that might be cool for fiddling with VMs on hardware at home.

For containers, I have a GKE cluster that I run a bunch of stuff on. I leave it up but it's mostly for learning purposes. This is kind of the testing ground for Kubernetes ideas I might want to take to work, and a place to play with GCP :P I used cert-manager and subdomains to get a bunch of services running on it nicely with TLS: Prometheus, Drone CI, Argo CI/CD, Harbor docker registry.

GKE is one of my favorite tools right now.

This is my personal stuff only. My work is all Azure.

I sorely lack AWS experience; I think my next personal project will be wrangling that beast. I already have an idea in mind :)

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jordan33h profile image
Jordan

One ❤ for the UI, and also performance

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joehobot profile image
Joe Hobot

For me it all depends.

If its some blog or site then I use shared hosting as I get it for like $3p/m , if blog/site goes over 20K visitors per month I move it onto AWS.

If its something personal like an app etc, again I use AWS.

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jordan33h profile image
Jordan

Depends on bottlenecks, choose the right solution. I'm not fans of fancy things, all I want to achieve is simple stable and performance.

Container is really good things for make sure environment consistensy, speedy deploy and testing.

Serverless is good for Webhook-like and resource spiking scenario, billed by invoked calls, it might save a lot cost but different story with high resource usage. Development is also depends on framework/environment/provider, probably you need abstract your code base very well, else need to rewrite. (As my understanding)

But if you are more to PHP based, it is not recommended to do orchestrating, 1 PHP website container, can equal my whole hosting server usage. About 15 website, MySQL, Nginx, PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 via managed panel, and also running two JAVA web service (SparkJava), just about 400mb ram usage, created 2yr ago, > 96% up time.

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Stefan Dorresteijn

Much of my freelance work ends up on GCP. Most of my personal projects end up on Heroku and Netlify. Anything non-standard ends up on AWS and anything that needs to run "serverless" ends up on AWS Lambda.

I have too many hosting providers.

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Travis

TeamCoco.com is hosted on AWS. We also use a bunch of AWS services for video transcoding, batch processing, transcription, etc.

For personal projects, I tend to use Google Cloud and Firebase to prototype and transition to AWS once my needs grow.