Sometimes I feel spinning up a whole AWS band of services isn't necessary for small projects like a personal blog or a small web app. I've been looking into Linode and DO.<p>What services do you use for small personal projects?
For a static blog/site, there are lots of options like neocities, netlify, bitballoon, github pages etc...<p>I built a service that hosts static files and provides a CORS api to a 'backend as a service' that provides a database, captcha, and user management. My goal was to provide everything I'd need so I wouldn't have to go set up a server for ever little project I wanted to do. I welcome any and all feedback:<p><a href="https://www.lite-engine.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.lite-engine.com</a>
OpenShift - you can get some instances for free<p>Cloudatcost - One time fee. The instance is laggy sometimes, but it's gotten better since they launched and I only paid ~$20 (after coupon) a couple years ago so not a terrible value.<p>self-host! - Since I like tinkering with bare metal, I have a server in my home that I CDN through CloudFlare. CloudFlare is mostly to shield my ip address and make it less obvious I'm hosting a server (inbound is HTTPS using CloudFlare origin certificates). Currently have a server that just runs Docker containers, but might try Xen.
I use DigitalOcean, which has great speeds and network, but also use a dedicated server from WholesaleInternet, in which I host a few VPSs for development purposes.
There was a discussion last week "Which VPN would you recommend?"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311366" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311366</a><p>My answer was <a href="https://privatepackets.io/" rel="nofollow">https://privatepackets.io/</a> which spins up a DO instance for $3.
I've been with various hosting providers, however as presiously mentioned linode are bang on the money for service and ive never had any issues with them in the past 5 years (i have multiple nodes with them.<p>However for development i host my own onsite vps's, with the use of xenserver and proxmox this gives the best environment to deploy any multitude of configurations.<p>Lastly i have some external testing/staging servers (not always vps nodes) that i use, these are miles cheaper than linode and other providers but not always as great in terms of support. These are hosted with OVH under their budget brand kimsufi. They also have a brand called Sostart and OVH and those are better supported brands.<p>I hope that helps you out!
Scaleway provide small ARM server begining from 3e/month<p><a href="https://www.scaleway.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scaleway.com/</a>
RamNode, super inexpensive, and I have never had any problems with them.<p>You can get a 512mb(RAM) server for $3.50/mo.<p>I was also looking at linode a while back, it looks pretty nice.
I use either a bare-metal server from online.net coupled with LXC to have multiple separated "servers".<p>Or just hosting them on my "server" at home (LXC again), which is actually a DIY beefy PC with an i7-4790 3.60GHz CPU, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB (RAID 1) HDD, APC UPS with a ~20 minute battery runtime, 100/100mbit fiber connection.
I like to use GitHub Pages as much as possible (with CloudFlare TLS for custom domains).<p>For more dynamic stuff, AWS Lambda is my new best friend. I'm using it for a few projects and loving it.<p>For more long-running stuff I'm likely to use EC2, or for some things my dedicated Hetzner server.
I prefer to use AWS services that don't require any "spinning up": CloudFront/ACS/S3 for static web files, API Gateway/Lambda for backend, IoT for websockets. It takes some effort to configure everything, but then there's pretty much zero maintenance involved, so you can move on to other projects and keep the old ones running at very low cost.