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Ask HN: Where do you host your db's for your side projects?

3 points by aerovistae ↗ HN
I'm looking to create a project that would use MongoDB, and I've never created my own back-end before, so I'm exploring options. I'm not sure what people's go-to solutions are for this.

The only option I see is hosting via DBaaS with Compose or mLab or similar, and these cost $31 and $15 per month respectively for one gigabyte of data.

This seems insane to me. How can anyone afford this profitably with anything less than a total success of a side project? Surely a successful project might use hundreds or even thousands of GB of db space when people start to really use it, no? My project would involve storing thousands of PDFs, among other files.

Do people use DBaaS for such cases, or manage their own on Digital Ocean, AWS, etc? I have no knowledge of how to do that (yet).

10 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] thread
eberkund
You plan to store PDFs in your database? Why?
aerovistae
I misspoke in the post. I didn't mean to say that. DB for user accounts and various site data; file storage for PDFs.
klurriplurrr
Amazon S3 is a cheap option for file storage. I don't exactly understand why you would store files in a database.
nkristoffersen
Agreed. Store as much as possible in S3. Store only what's necessary in a DB.
kirankn
Agree. DBaaS are all quite expensive. I would suggest going for your own machine. You should probably checkout Scaleway/AWS RDS etc.

Also, storing files in S3 would workout better.

richardknop
Best option would be to rent a dedicated server and put all your side projects there until one of them catches on and you need to scale.

You can get a small dedicated server for $30-40 per month. If you rent it yearly you will often get a discount.

richardknop
Store your PDFs on the dedicated server. If it's not sufficient, use S3. But a dedicated server should be able to handle couple thousand PDFs if your traffic is low.
sprobertson
I usually run mongodb directly on a tiny $5 server from Digital Ocean or AWS and it works fine for a low (to no) traffic side project.
romanovcode
Use DBaaS only if you need it. For a side project they give very little advantage since you don't care about the region as well as replicating and scaling that much.
backmail
I use mlab for my side project , though my requirements are well under 1 GB. But as others have pointed out, having a dedicated server/VPS will be the best way for your needs

Note: https://www.clusterpoint.com/pricing is slightly priced less , if cost is your major factor .