A while ago I created a discussion on static sites and you gave some extended insights on options available 👍
Often you need to expand the functionality of the site, and that's where you write some server-side code. Where do you host it?
I'm aware of options like Heroku, Vercel, AWS, Google Cloud and Digital Ocean. Which one do you prefer and why do you like it?
Latest comments (41)
your Digital Ocean link is pointing to... Google Cloud
Thanks for the heads up 🙏❤ Fixed 😉
Yea I would recommend Firebase, so easy to use! You can run cloud functions out the box very easily or you can use Cloud Run along with Firebase hosting. I have not used the Cloud Run/Hosting option though so can't speak for it's ease of use.
Heroku works 😊 and is about the right amount of magic vs configuration.
I had servers on Webfaction (managed shared hosting which is affordable and extremely developer-friendly) and Hetzner (VPS, good value for money) but at some point, I moved to Digital Ocean, for the reasons already mentioned by others. Apart from that, DO is like Ubuntu: being so popular results in being the first, or among the first, providers that a new tool will support.
I'm not writing server side code at the moment but I would be hosting it along my nojs static site generator mkws.sh on an openbsd.amsterdam machine. It runs OpenBSD, my favorite operating system and I find it cheap at 60$ pe year. I don't need a control panel. I also run a tiny Void Linux VPS with tinykvm.com, also cheap at 15$ per year, kinda low on specs but it's enough for my problems (statically compiling a mkws(1) Linux version). If at some point I would prefer a more powerful Linux VPS, I'd go with cockbox.org/ also pretty cheap.
Last week I've migrated from a custom server to Netlify Functions, I only needed to apply little tweaks and it was ready to go.
On a server. 🥁
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waiter.
For node.js, I use heroku, mainly for testing and staging, and AWS or Google cloud for production.
For PHP, I have a BlueHost VPS, never encountered any downtime, and their support is A+. Really like it.
I just started hosting the core of statically.io on DigitalOcean. I like how easy it is to have everything in here, CPU, RAM, disk, network, firewall, it has proven to save my time.
For example, on the URL to Image service I run, I'm running a heavy Chrome browser there, and it works fast and fine. Well OK I can still run this software on Google Cloud or AWS, but I don't want to lose all this convenience.
You can try it yourself:
https://cdn.statically.io/screenshot/:urlLive: cdn.statically.io/screenshot/dev.to
Your website will be accessed from DigitalOcean IP addresses with the
Statically-Screenshotuser agent.I’ve tried literally all of the ones you mention and some that others have mentioned (Vultr for example). I also have a couple of Raspberry Pis at home for projects.
We have run lots of things at work on AWS Lambda and GCP, and on EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk.
But i recently switched a side project to Vercel and let me tell you— i was so impressed with the process. I merged two repos into one, so I have my front end Nuxt app and my Apollo GraphQL server in one root folder. Running “vercel dev” locally spins up a dev server for both the front end and back end, and when I want to deploy it’s as easy as pushing to my master branch and Vercel takes care of the rest. CDN delivered SPA and serverless backend. 🔥
Now, I will say this workflow doesn’t work for long living backend processes. If you have to do some heavy machine learning work or processing, you probably need a beefy always-on machine. But for my use case building Saas, it’s perfect.