HN Explorer

Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

29 points by aosaigh ↗ HN
I'm a solo dev working on both my own apps and a product as part of a small team. I'm interested to hear how others are running their apps?

- Self hosted on a VPS? - Managed infrastructure like AWS, Fly, Render, Digital Ocean App Platform, GCP? - Full-stack platform like Vercel, Firebase, Supabase?

54 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread
eru2
Currently using heroku for a backend server for an app I'm working on, in the past I've played with a lot of different options, but most of them are too complicated and expensive if you don't actually have paying users.
anso_cc
1GB RAM DigitalOcean VPS
codehooks
Netlify for front-end and codehooks.io for the backend.
TobbenTM
Fully managed so I can spend my time on actually building features. In my case, AWS is my go to cloud, and even with a couple of thousand users, Lambda for compute, DynamoDB for database and SNS+SQS for eventing is costing me less than 5€ per month. Yes, there are risks with serverless if you get DDOSed or whatever, but it’s a risk I’m fine with, and can mitigate with gateways in front if necessary. And Lambdas are not locking me in to AWS since I’m running “full” ASP.Net apps in them, so hosting them on actual compute platforms is an easy switch.
aosaigh
Interesting. Did you migrate to a serverless architecture or was your app serverless from the start?
TobbenTM
It was serverless from the start, although there isn't a whole lot of serverless unique code in it, apart from some event handler bootstrapping to handle SQS triggered Lambdas. Everything else is just standard .Net that would look the same no matter where it's hosted. Huge fan of separating infrastructure concerns from the rest of the app to not lock yourself in so much.
romanhn
Very similar tech stack here, with all the same motivations. Biggest differences are I'm using RDS for the database and have a slightly different approach for serverless compute. I started out with Lambda, but the cold start times were bugging me so I moved production hosting to App Runner, which is the next best thing (eliminates cold start without breaking the wallet). Kept staging environment on Lambda. Also using the "fat lambda" approach with ASP.NET apps, so no lock-in here. Spending about $35/mo total - RDS is the biggest contributor, then App Runner and other small things.

I also have an SSR app for the homepage which required some dynamic functionality. Basic Node app hosted in a Cloudflare worker essentially for free, hitting the App Runner hosted API for data.

tmitchel2
Snap, I'm using CDK to set it all up too which makes everything pretty easy to manage.
nicbou
Docker on a DigitalOcean VPS. I've never been a fan of managed stuff, but then again I'm mostly coding for fun, not because it's the best use of my time.
pestatije
im considering Railway due to not requiring credit card, but have not decided yet so cannot tell if its good or not
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
mbrain
Dokku on a Hetzner instance, can handle 10s of apps if I need. Very simple to setup and manage. Deploys with git push.
leros
I host some very small things on Firebase but I'm mostly using Render for projects these days (I switched from Heroku)
is_true
VPS + Cloudflare CDN, R2 and Workers
kaliara
Render has been a great heroku replacement. I thought I would miss the “add-ons marketplace” but it’s actually been fine. Costs are reasonable for our startup and they seemed to have fixed their odd Cloudflare downtimes of the past.
nocommandline
I try to stick to serverless rather than trying to manage any infrastructure

1) Google App Engine Standard. Datastore for DB.

2) For anything that won’t work with the above, then it’s Google Cloud Run

rozenmd
AWS for the important stuff: DB, core services

Cloudflare/Vercel for the UI

Increasingly moving the important stuff to Cloudflare

auspex
ELB with WAF -> Fargate -> RDS
otmahthe
So, I've found that a mix of VPS / Cloud is great for me.

I have VPSs with Ionos, they're cheap and for the rest its all over GCP, functions, scheduler, firestore, storage, CDN and Cloud run are convenient tools.

Namecheap for domains, feels reliable.

Maybe switching to Hetzner for VPS if I need bigger ones, feels reliable and good priced.

qeternity
Rancher k8s + Helm charts for HA services (Redis Sentinel + Patroni Postgres). Nightly snapshot backups + streaming Postgres WAL segments to S3.

I’ve never understood the k8s hate. We have been running this for a few years and it is rock solid. We can bring the entire cluster up on any provider anywhere in the world in about an hour. The DR is great.

bravetraveler
Combination of labs, colo, and partnerships with other parties.

Varying types of platforms and degrees of control. Ansible is the most unanimous thing I can name

zackify
Fly.io.

One command and it’s in another region, with my data thanks to litefs. It works great for my read heavy e-commerce app

hyldmo
Extremely happy with supabase here, it has mostly eliminated the need for a backend, letting me just focus on making valuable stuff for my users. I also ended up making my entire app realtime just because it was easier
blockwriter
Vercel after moving away from Docker containers running on AWS.
eddd-ddde
What are the advantages of Vercel over Cloudflare pages?
distortionfield
My setup is a digital ocean box with docker compose scripts and watchtower for deploys. All I have to do is push a new image and it will deploy in prod. Database is as aged Postgres cause that’s all that is really important. Cloudflare for the smaller services.
eitchugo
Self-hosted on a VPS is the first option for me, it's cheap and you have total control on everything. It's valid in my case because I know my way through infrastructure and configuration, so a panel isn't too much gain.

You sometimes can even get those for free - https://free-for.dev/#/?id=major-cloud-providers

For example, I have some (really) free instances on Oracle Cloud that I host pages, experiments, and so many things.

clay_the_ripper
Netlify for the front-end, google cloud for extended storage and Akamai for hosting. Akamai is great as they are less customizable than AWS (which is a good thing if you don’t need extra config) and much less expensive.
felipemesquita
We have our own servers (mostly consumer pc parts) and run lxd to slice them up into vms/containers. Deploy to those using kamal and expose the web server port through cloudflare tunnels. With simple scripts to periodically compress and upload the storage volumes and database dumps to Google drive, most of our less critical apps cost about $0 to keep running. For the higher criticality apps, we also deploy them to Linux vms using kamal, but use a commercial service (linode).