Ask HN: Where to host for a fully managed OS?
I’m looking for a web host. I don’t want to have to deal with OS updates, log rotation, web server / Lets Encrypt setup, etc.
You typically get all of this on a Shared web server plan.
But I need more resources and typically dedicated servers from web hosting company’s are unmanaged.
Does anyone have a recommendations?
10 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] threadEdit: Ah… yes the downvote for answering the question. I hope you get stuck in traffic for the next week.
https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server
Off topic: I too lately have been getting random quick downvotes for no apparent reason. It’s very odd. I just upvoted you :)
It appears Hetzner managed hosting is only in Europe.
What exactly are you trying to run/host?
If it's a webpage/web app, you might not even need a traditional managed LAMP/LEMP stack... there are next-gen hosts like Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Gatsby, or slightly-less-next-gen hosts like AWS Amplify, Github Pages, Google App Engine, etc. I would call these "serverless web hosts", where you can basically git push your repo and all the hosting and scaling are taken care of for you, transparently, and you never have to worry about any of the LEMP stack anymore.
Have you considered that instead?
Or if it's Wordpress or Drupal you're running, Pantheon is (IMO) miles above the rest. WPEngine and Kinsta are competitors.
Otherwise, for general managed hosting, yeah, Hetzner is one that I've heard good things about. I've also used and liked RoseHosting.
Cloudways is "managed automation" in that they abstract a lot of the management into a nice control panel, and it works pretty well as long as you don't have to deviate from their templates. GridPane and RunCloud can do similar things on your own VMs.
Do you know of any US based web hosts? It appears Hetzner managed hosting is only in Europe.
They offer managed PHP hosting, but not managed database.
Anyone else?
Those are even better than fully-managed hosting because they abstract the database scaling and backups, etc. and manage it all for you and give you just the DB you can access.
Examples: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-post...
https://www.elephantsql.com/
https://www.heroku.com/postgres
https://www.linode.com/products/postgresql/
https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/features
If so, latency must be brutal for a web app.
But I dunno your app. Maybe you need good frequent write performance (a social app, for example), in which case a read cache won't do you much good.
I wouldn't say that having the DB and PHP in separate data centers (but within the same general reason) would be an automatic dealbreaker. You can test it and see.
If you have to have everything in one area you should still be able to do that with something like Google Cloud (app engine plus managed Postgres in the same zone). Maybe AWS or azure has a similar offering. I think digitalocean can run PHP too but it's been a while and I forget how low level (or not) they are.
You can go all the way down to a old school LEMP stack if you really want to (on a vm or bare metal) but even the vendors that are "fully managed" are not the same as actual abstractions like the serverless, because they still have to semi manually apply upgrades, etc. and can sometimes take a few days. Support is expensive too (but usually good), whereas you can avoid those complexities with a more abstracted serverless stack.
There are a bunch of tradeoffs between speed, maintenance, cost, reliability, support, etc.
If you explain more about your needs, happy to discuss it more. If you're more comfortable with a single vendor bare metal VM like the early 2000s kind, keep looking, they have to be out there somewhere...