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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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What are the least expensive cloud providers at various levels of use?

If you're generally familiar with one or more services out there: What's the cost landscape as you know it?

No services are apples-to-apples, but I'm curious about the big leaders in cost-effectiveness.

Top comments (29)

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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coly010 profile image
Colum Ferry

I'd say the firebase one is true to a degree. However, depending how you've written your Firestore code, you could end up exceeding your free quota very quickly.

There's a lot more thought needed around, when to read data from firestore and how often you do so.

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Dave

Complex project less than $30/month? May I know how many users are using your app?

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Sattwik Sahu • Edited

Wow that's awesome 😀👍

Btw, would you suggest Vercel or Netlify? Which one's better?

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Firebase is more of a PaaS than and IaaS

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Edited

Oracle Cloud is 1/7th of the cost of computing then AWS, or that's at least what I keep being told. I didn't bother to crunch the numbers.

You have to be very specific about what cloud services and what cobinations because it's really complicated.

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Glenn Carremans

I like Digital Ocean for my personal projects. Very clean dashboard and cheap pricing.
It has all the things that I need, root access, server stats, server monitoring/notifications, automated backups, cloud firewall, VPC network.

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

Heroku + Cloudflare + Custom domain is probably the cheapest way to deploy Docker with HTTPS.

But now I stick with Google Cloud Run, as it is faster and scalable as well.

Of course, Qovery is more customizable and powerful, but it still feels experimental to me. Nonetheless, Qovery team on Discord is very active.

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Romaric P.

Thanks Pacharapol 🙏 We work hard to make it better day by day.

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ImTheDeveloper

Hetzner
Aruba cloud
Ssdnodes

Ordered by reliability. But these 3 are my go-to for any time I just need some standard components without getting murdered on price.

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Alex Barashkov

Bare metal always will be the cheapest and highest performance for sure.

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manish srivastava • Edited

Buy a vps with kvm / cloud account and then install opennebula. Your own private cloud.

Inside article there are links for opennebula and easy cloudstack installation.

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Jonathan Boudreau

I think the better place to start is to ask what sort of services do you want. There's a ton of options out there and its easier to look at options by cutting out providers that don't have the services you want. Do you want managed databases? Is it OK with you if they're proprietary databases (e.g., are you fine with using firebase / dynamodb / cosmosdb)? Do you want Kubernetes as a service? Or just infrastructure as a service?

I can recommend looking at some underdogs like linode or digitalocean which have a pretty good offering of services for the cost. Its very hard to calculate prices accurately because there's a lot of differences in how each provider bills you. For example digitalocean and azure give you the Kubernetes control plane for free, but with AWS you have to pay IIRC. There's also some gotchas with ELB compared to other load balancers.

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Brookes

I use Heroku for nearly all of my hobby projects. We've even started using it at my place of work for it's ease of deployment, auto-scaling and monitoring. It's very easy to start spending larger sums of money on their but it's very transparent.

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SwissGreg • Edited

For starters and medium projects I can definitely recommend Heroku.

It is dead simple, you can use free dynos for apps that don't need to be always live.

Hobby dynos (something like a simple EC2) start only 7 USD per month, and we handled HackerNews traffic with them at SwissDevJobs.ch

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MxL Devs • Edited

I've been using heroku for personal projects that I'd like to run 24/7 and not having to leave my machine on and I seem to be able to manage to squeeze by with the free monthly credit, though I believe it it is intended for development/prototyping purposes only and not for commercial use? Not sure.

I saw Vercel being recommended and it doesn't appear to have an issue with commercial vs non-commercial projects so I might switch to that for more commercial projects. It also supports Ruby which is something I like.

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Muhammed Maher

I've been using Linode for over a year now, I initially wanted aws but my the creditcard provider was not supported, now that I have another creditcard, I'm still a happy linode user.

however, I would say my projects aren't big enough to really test how would the service stand against a high availability production server. just to mention :)

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Julia Flash • Edited

UPDATE: IBM Cloud costed me $8 bucks.

Previously had costs at nothing.

  • Vercel for frontend
  • GCP for MongoDB Atlas
  • IBM Cloud for backend by Node runtime.

is my personal site build. Then name.com for domain names but I use godaddy now too for buying domains.

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Theo

Same here, I host on github pages - dead simple and free hosting. Then use namescheap for a simple free .me domain and that's it.

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Kyle Mistele

AWS has a free-tier for some services & technologies like EC2 (cloud computer), DynamoDB, Lambda (serverless functions), RDS (managed MySQL) and so forth, and it's really great. I've found their pricing to be really reasonable. I wasn't a big fan of Azure when I tried it. Can't speak to Google Cloud, DigitalOcean or other providers since I haven't used them.

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Ali Kamalizade

For frontend projects I am happy with Netlify: great support, easy to use, fair pricing.

For backend I have used Heroku which works alright. However, I recently tried out Render.com and I like it a lot: it provides much out-of-the-box functionality and it's dead-simple to use.

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Bob

Build a Meteor + (Vue, React, Svelte, Angular, or Blaze) app and you can use Meteor Galaxy Hosting. You can use it 1 month for free and a starter app for just $7 a month. Crazy good deal for everything you get.

You can also shut down the container if you don't have active users if you really want to save money during development.

And there is no faster way on the planet to build a full-stack app than with Meteor. Get mobile & desktop installables with PWA options added.

Galaxy runs on AWS EC2 containers. You can increase the size of containers, or the number of containers to scale. It's effortless.

With Meteor, you typically use MongoDB as your main database and you can run a 3 node replicating cluster on MongoDB's Atlas product for free to start, and you can scale up from there too.

So basically you can start for almost free and there is no limit, pay only for what you use / need.