▲ 5 points

Ask HN: How to host a Show HN project affordably?

by EwanG·14y ago·20 comments·view on hn ↗

Am working on an editor type of project more because I need it than because I plan to spin out a business. On the other hand, I think there might be a number of folks out there who would be interested. So I was thinking of buying a domain, and setting up on a public host. But it appears that the really cheap options would get expensive fast if there were any substantial traffic, and the expensive options wouldn't make sense if this turns out to be a less common problem after all. Just wondering how the rest of you handle this? For the sake of understanding, I will point out that as a married father of three, with a handicapped child in the mix, I consider expensive to be anything that would cost more than $50 for the first two months.

20 comments

I personally would recommend a 512mb Linode. I'm not sure what you consider expensive. With my budget (which may be drastically different from yours, or might be close to the same) I opted for the 512mb. It's like $19/mo but it's an amazing service. Full control over the VPS, root access, pre-made stack scripts which you can use to deploy a linux distro with one click and have it install all your server software and configure it from the start.

Their documentation is amazing, they have tons of tutorials/how-tos on everything from basic linux admin stuff to advanced topics.

Check out this performance comparison. Some of the info is a little old but I think it's still useful. I wouldn't take it all to heart but use it as another resource in your search.

http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/

edit: there have been a number of ask hn: vps thread's and it seems like Linode gets a large majority of the votes from the users here (from what I've seen, I haven't looked through all of the threads).

EC2 has a tier thats free for a year. So does Heroku if you're using a language/framework they support. I believe PHP fog does as well.

Would you happen to have links to any of these offers? A quick (albeit minimal) search doesn't reveal a "free for a year" option on any of these, instead EC2 and Heroku have pricing calculators that imply free only if hardly used.

In all of those cases I also presume I need to "bring my own" DNS registration and forwarding - whereas some of the cheaper hosts will let you register a name for a year as part of your subscription.

Thanks!

http://www.heroku.com/pricing#1-0

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Both of these are free for a year despite te confusing hourly breakdown.

I'll have to look into the heroku then. I've had an amazon AWS account for some time (though I've mainly used it just to try things out myself before recommending to a client), and so don't appear to be able to use the one year option.

Thanks for the links!

Speaking from experience, Heroku's free tier doesn't hold up well against "Show HN"-type traffic.

That was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to hear - not that there were problems with Heroku, but which systems held up for folks. Given your earlier message, I presume you used Linode and it held up ok?

Yeah, Linode works fine. The primary issue with Heroku is that the free tier only serves one request at a time, so if you get a rush of traffic, you end up with a big backed up request queue. On Linode, that's not an issue, unless you have a behemoth app that takes up so much RAM that you can't use more than one worker at a time.

I can testify that an EC2 micro (free tier) instance stands up to some level of traffic as long as your site is built well.

It is also easy to scale that instance in the case that you need even more capacity and are willing to pay a bit more for the expected high traffic time period.

If you know about how much memory you'll need and don't care about I/O cycles there are a lot of low-end VPS for only a few bucks (<$10/month). Low end box features a lot of them and specials. Of course there are also monthly posts about which providers went under, so keep a backup.

I would suggest you to start with http://www.webfaction.com. It will cost you $9.50/month if you choose monthly payment schedule. It has enough flexibility to let you use most of the popular technologies(any software that runs on PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl or Java with MySql, Postgresql or sqlite).

If things go well and you can afford it, switch to Linode 512mb plan that will cost you $19/month and you will have full control over your development environment. (http://www.linode.com)

Need even more power? Keep adding more nodes to your linode account or switch to cloud hosting like Amazon EC2. :)

Like others, I'd recommend a 512mb Linode. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's enough to run a well-architected app, and if you need more juice, you can always upgrade to a larger Linode.

$20/month is dirt cheap for the quality of platform you get with them.

You can throw a small Adsense ad on it, and if the page is getting any traffic, that'll help diffuse costs. I've got a hobby project that does about a half million pageviews/month (which isn't bad, since it's a single-page JS app) and it pays for itself about twice over with a single 300x250 in the bottom right-hand corner.

Does anyone know the best VPS or cloud service if you need modest (average) computing power but have pretty sizable database storage requirements (on the order of 30-60 gb)?

The only Linode plans with that kind of storage have much more RAM/Transfer than I'd need.

Start with a budget webhost like DreamHost for $9/month.

If it takes off, you can migrate to their (also budget) VPS service.

If it doesn't take off, take advantage of their 97 day refund policy.

For what it's worth a co-worker was using the $9/mo DreamHost plan and it was painfully slow. While he was working on his project, he had a static html page as a landing page. It only had an h1 tag that said "Coming soon". It took about 10-12 seconds on average to load the page. DreamHost also broke his rails installation (basic rails set up) and they told him that he must have broken it because he was using a "custom build of rails". They later admitted they broke it with a server update.

I convinced him to move to a 512mb Linode and he has been extremely happy since.

2nd'ed Also here is a promo code to get $97 off you first year... so you end up with 1 year of hosting for $13

HN97OFF

Tried to sign up for this, but it puts you directly into a two week trial for free, and I can't find any way to tell it that I have a promo code so that I can pay for the year. Any suggestion on what I might be doing wrong?

Just in case anyone else runs into this - if they are running a promotion at the time (in this case a Veteran's Day sale), they give you the code to enter, but then the system automatically applies the discount - which somewhat begs the question of why they give you the code. You can see the discount in the not immediately apparent invoice that is generated.

To all the Linode recommenders: If localization were not critical, which data center would you choose? I know enough from recent news to stay away from Freemont (IIRC), California. What about Texas versus Georgia versus, I seem to recall, one on the East Coast in the neighborhood of New Jersey.

I'm focusing on the U.S. If there's an argument for using one of their overseas centers, though, I'd be interested in hearing it.

Thanks. I'm in a similar position of maybe about to give Linode a go.

I just chose Georgia. It's the closest datacenter to me (in Florida).