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Ask HN: Best public cloud for small websites?

7 points by eslaught ↗ HN
With AWS now charging for IPv4 addresses, my reserved instance for a small personal website is no longer anywhere near as cheap as it used to be.

I was going to go back to Linode (which I had used previously), but it seems they've been acquired.

What do people recommend these days? I'm in the US and would (probably) prefer a US-based service, but feel free to answer for different localities (so this can perhaps be useful to others).

In my case, the site in question is a random name generator. Compute/bandwidth requirements should be near zero, so I'm mostly optimizing for cost, reliability and non-shadiness: https://random-name.org/

23 comments

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pestatije
non-shadiness: would u please explain?

they dont offer full cloud services, but if you can accommodate, Railway (https://railway.app/) has served me well

eslaught
Not in web hosting, but in the domain registrar space GoDaddy is basically peak shady.

Thanks for the suggestion.

architectfwd
What is your web stack? Is it possible to put it on S3 with cloudfront in front?
eslaught
I'm running a Common Lisp webserver with (I believe) nginx in front. It's fairly low maintenance, but it is dynamic web content (the entire point is to generate names on request), so I unless the CDN has some sort of function interface, I don't see how that would work.
solardev
If you can rewrite that part of it as a JS function, you can probably host it as a free or very very cheap serverless function on Cloudflare or Vercel. Either would also be able to host the static parts of your site for free or very cheap.

Vercel is a AWS and other cloud whitelabeler. Cloudflare has their own networks.

architectfwd
What about offloading the dynamic parts to a lambda and just static the rest like I suggested above?

You may need to port to another language for the lambda fn though

eslaught
Yeah, the static portion is trivial. The trouble with the dynamic portion is that I use a proprietary C/C++ library that I'd have to replace. I suppose in this day and age I ought to be able to do better with some of the modern deep learning techniques that are available, but I haven't been able to invest the effort to figure that out yet.
remram
Amazon/Google/Oracle free tiers should be good for a small project. It does include an IPv4.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/free-tier-faqs/

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu...

eslaught
I'll need to look into the other clouds. But as for Amazon, the page about their Elastic IP price change clarifies that the free tier includes 12 months only, making the IP itself a nontrivial fraction of the total cost to run an instance:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...

remram
Ah yes, my bad, it seems it might only be for the first 12 months then $3.6/mo.

Do take a look at the other clouds, Oracle in particular offers an ARM VM with 24 GB of memory for free which is interesting for some workloads.

giantg2
When did this change?

I have website served through S3 and Route53. Seems to only cost 50 cents per month per site, plus the $12 per year per site for the domain.

remram
So you don't have a dedicated IPv4... What are you asking?
giantg2
I guess my question now is, why am I so dumb...
cpach
These are the ones I would look into: Fly, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Tornado VPS, Vultr.
crackalamoo
Seconding DigitalOcean, it's worked well for me.
jjice
Another +1 for Digital Ocean. Been using them for years for basic VPS services. $6 flat gets you a simple VM and $4 gets you one with half (I think) the specs, but it could be fine for really simple stuff.

Nice and simple UI.

askz
Doprax.com is built on top of hetzner/digitalocean/ovh/vultr and has nice auto-deploy functions from github ! And accepts lots of payments options
nicbou
DigitalOcean has been rock solid for a decade for me.
IAmGraydon
I'm still using Linode (have been for around 10 years). Everyone acts like being acquired is some kind of cancer or something, but I don't see a reason to leave. Their pricing is the same as their only real competitor (DigitalOcean) and they just made a nearly $50M investment into upgrading their infrastructure. If they start slipping in terms of offerings, price or customer service, I may move to DO. Until then, I'm perfectly happy with them.
eslaught
I guess I got turned off by the visually loud Akamai branding on their landing page, and the talk of "cloud" on that page made me think they'd done away with the old Linode VPS product entirely. But it's good to know it still exists. Thanks.
aborsy
If it’s a static website, S3 has “use for static website “ option. You can put cloud front in front of it and the cost normally would be pennies.

But there is a small risk of DDoS or similar passing through their basic protections, and suddenly a huge bill!

hiAndrewQuinn
Hell, if it's a static website, you can probably just get away with like GitHub Pages or something. Lotta options in that space.
catherinecodes
Check out Hetzner (Germany) and Entrywan (US). They have good prices and a no-nonsense approach.