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?
Latest comments (29)
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.
On my project, we use Red Hat OpenShift, a container-based platform.
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.
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
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. 🙂
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
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.
I use DigitalOcean for the most. But it depends, I'm also using Glitch for demos and Surge.sh for some frontend project.
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.
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.
I make all my sites to be static so I use a mix of Netlify and GitHub Pages.
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.
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.
Yeah this is kind of where I'm at too.
...depends. What do you mean by a server? Do you mean configuring a vm (like a DO droplet) or a docker container and simply configuring your server's [framework-of-choice] headers, cache policy, etc?
For all-things-static I use Netlify or now.sh. My current company's production runs on DO, although I believe a lot of the VM is unused most of the time, so we might opt for something else in the future.
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.
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 :)
One ❤ for the UI, and also performance