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Ask HN: How do you host your own side-projects?

15 points by lsb ↗ HN
I've got a bunch of side-projects, each with a non-trivial database (dozen gigs or so each), and I want to consolidate hosting providers. What do you recommend, and why?

I've looked at AWS, and I'm not sure I trust their EBS volumes. I've looked at NearlyFreeSpeech, but their data storage rates ($10/GB/mo) are far too high. I've looked at Heroku, but all the add-ons get pretty expensive. I've looked at renting a plain dedicated server, but not sure I'm ready to handle backups and such.

I don't have much experience in this, so please correct my assumptions where wrong.

Thanks very much.

18 comments

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sumukh1
A VPS or Dedicated server might fit your needs.

I'd also look into Linode.

lsb
Hm, Linode's disk space looks too small for me. What VPS or Dedicated Server do you recommend? Google searches are mostly spam for me.
tfitzgerald
I'm curious: What do you need the disk space for? Is it something that can be farmed out to say, Amazon S3?
lsb
Currently, I've got a 60GB database of indexed n-grams, for an art project / data vis. I've also got ~20GB of relational data running a Latin website. I like manipulating and visualizing lots of data, so it'd be better not to denormalize it too early.
xaritas
I found your Latin project through your profile. That's very cool—I also did the vaunted CompSci/Classics combo and I've considered doing something like this before. It's nice to see that something is already out there.

To be more on topic, I've found Linode to be pretty excellent along with everybody else. If your relational data happens to be in MySQL, Dreamhost has an enormous quota. Not the best for performance but I assume your data set is static, aside from user accounts.

saiko-chriskun
seconding linode, or perhaps tilaa.nl if you want something a bit cheaper. had good experiences with each.
liquidcool
If they're small enough, I'll self-host. Cable modem has enough bandwidth and servers are cheap, but admittedly can be a pain to administer yourself.

I recently looked around at 3rd parties and Rackspace's "cloud" offering looked competitive, depending on your needs.

BTW, you really should list your platform. For example, you have way more choices for PHP hosting than for Java/JVM.

lsb
Ah, thanks. I'd never self-host.

I have a mid-size Sinatra.rb app that's getting subjected to the Slicehost reboot which is causing the desire to consolidate, but I've written in PHP and Haskell. I can be pretty flexible language-wise, as long as it runs in Unix.

liquidcool
I've no experience with Slicehost or their reboot policy. I'm guessing they won't let you put a graceful shutdown/startup script in the relevant /etc/rc* directory? Seems like they should have some hook for that if the servers reboot/fail that often. Assuming that even solves your problem.
lsb
No no, they're turning off their old datacenter (afaict) and they're fully integrating with Rackspace who bought them a few years ago. They've been superstable.
tectonic
Checkout http://lowendbox.com for cheap options and postings on http://webhostingtalk.com for more. Or just pay for something known to be reliable like linode or heroku.

Edit: Actually- my advice would be to either use Heroku if stuff is small, or pick a VPS service you like and put everything on one VPS box. Again, Linode is a great option.

kisom
I use Chunkhost and Bluemile Cloud; I've never had any issues with bluemile cloud (and I run a traffic heavy tor relay, SILC server, and several sites off my box) but I'm not sure if they offer VMWare instances any more. Chunkhost is generally decent but the network on the boxes is definitely slower than my other VPSes.

EDIT: forgot to mention I've used Heroku and Joyent's Smart Machines before as well. The Smart Machines are pretty solid, but I haven't used my Heroku app enough to say much about it.

ig1
Slicehost or Linode. Linode is cheaper but Slicehost does more hand holding if you're new to using VPSs.
mark_l_watson
In the last decade or so I have tried a lot of options for my own projects. Currently I have 3 year commitments for a small EC2 instance and a micro EC2 instance, and I sometimes use Heroku.

I also keep a large memory large EC2 instance configured but paused 99% of the time and I just use it for a few hours occasionally when I need more horsepower. I also use Elastic MapReduce.

I like EBS volumes, BTW, because they are easy to backup with S3 snapshots and I have nothing that requires very high I/O performance. For customers, I set up RAID 0 on EBS, but for my stuff, I don't bother.

I used to rent conventional VPS's but "standardizing" on Amazon's infrastructure seemed like a good move because all of my customers (except for perhaps 1 or 2) in the last 4 years use AWS.

Knowing AWS inside-out is a good job skill, and running your own projects on AWS helps learn reusable skills.