I am done with the coding and I would like to shoot my site into the wild and start some marketing. What are some of the best and most reliable options? Possibly cheaper ones..
Thanks so much.
Reading a lot of these comments make me think that everyone on HN is a cynic of the Oscar Wilde/Lady Windermere variety: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" [1].<p>IMHO you should go with Heroku and ignore anyone who's suggesting dedicated servers, VPSes, AWS, Docker or containers. Every moment you spend maintaining a server or doing devops is wasted because it's time not spent building or marketing your _app_.<p>New startups' biggest expense is founders' time. It seems a lot of people, even on HN, don't realise it because it's a hidden cost. But if you think that a decent developer is worth at least $50/hr and it might take you an 1hr to set up and 1hr/yr to manage a server (e.g. apply patches, update security) then you're better off not spending those 2hrs and paying an extra $100 hosting your app.<p>Worrying about the future infrastructure cost is also wrong-headed. It's a kind of premature optimisation. To get the real, expected future cost, the projected infrastructure cost has to be multiplied by the probability that you'll actually get big, which for start-ups, is very low.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/790/790-h/790-h.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.gutenberg.org/files/790/790-h/790-h.htm</a>
This highly depends on if your site is dynamic or static. If static, I would go with GitHub Pages or Netlify as they're free/cheap and easy to use. Static sites with this kind of hosting is also great in that they require practically zero maintenance.<p>If you have to run a dynamic site (less potential headaches if you avoid this), I would try to use something like Heroku. It's easily one of the simplest way to host a robust site that needs to scale without having to spend much time on admin and DevOps.<p>For the people recommending a VPS, DigitalOcean etc., you're talking about using a huge amount of your own time to make such a setup as robust, easy to use and low maintenance as Heroku. What about backups? Scripting server creation? Adding a load balancer and more servers? Security updates? Server security?<p>The more parts and scripts you have to put together yourself, the more things that can go wrong and the more time of yours it's going to consume. If you consider how much your own time is worth and how important your startup is to you, trying to save anything in the realm of $10 a month on a core part of your startup doesn't make any sense if this is going to cost you multiple hours of time a month.
No one has mentioned Heroku yet. Starting at $7 they are a bit more expensive than DigitalOcean, but with that extra $2 you'll get their platform, their tooling for deploying the app, their database backups. Adding other services later on is also easy with their addons. By choosing Heroku you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars in ops costs over a course of a few months.<p>The hosting cost may go up quickly, but if your business is successful you can either absorb it, or spend time and money to migrate away. They run on AWS, so picking the same location means you can run mixed infrastructure (part on Heroku, and part on AWS) without a latency hit. Thus, a hybrid configuration is very viable.
If "$10 / month" counts as cheap in your book, check out a Linode VPS. I've been using them for a couple years now, and I have been extremely satisfied (although I've upgraded to a beefier VPS as my project has grown in popularity).<p>Another good VPS option is DigitalOcean, which offers a smaller (and cheaper) plan for $5 / month.<p>There are also a lot of shared hosting providers out there that will sell you cheaper space, but I would not recommend this for anything non-trivial, as most of the time, you'll be limited to using PHP. Still, if you're looking for the best bang for your buck and you're willing to settle for shared hosting, check out Nearly Free Speech -- they are head and shoulders above any other shared hosting provider that I have ever tried.
Microsoft's BizSpark program gives startups $150/month in Azure credits for 3 years<p><a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/bizspark-startups/" rel="nofollow">https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/bizs...</a>
For any non-static website - Heroku FOR SURE. It's not even a question - I have two companies that both run on Heroku - both startups are profitable and both will remain on Heroku for the next couple of years. (<a href="https://www.switchup.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.switchup.org</a> and <a href="https://www.trycarriage.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.trycarriage.com</a>) - I know massive scale billion dollar companies that are on Heroku (e.g. Deliveroo, Macy's)<p>The cost/benefit analysis is ALWAYS positive in favor of Heroku until you hit super massive scale (minimum 2-3 years out for most startups, if ever). It's super easy to use. Their feature set is increasing monthly and they can handle a lot of different types of setups.
Hetzner is another option. But you don't really specify your requirements (geographical region, scalability , etc) so I don't know if this suits you.
AWS has a free plan during 12 months: <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/free" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/free</a>
Since you've provided no details at all for your requirements (does your startup need a flotilla of beefy servers to do real-time facial recognition across thousands of live 4K video feeds?) I'm assuming you have a static HTML site with zero backend required. In that case, a Jekyll/Hugo generated site hosted on Amazon S3 will be really cheap. Throw CloudFlare in front of it for even more cheapness if you expect loads of traffic. Your hosting bill will be measured in pennies per month.
Depending on your application and stack, you may want to consider Google Cloud or AWS. While I really like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, etc they lack production features like a centralized firewall and IAM security. Additionally AWS and Google have a slew of complimentary services so maybe you don't need raw physical machines. For example, instead you may be able to use Elasticache, RDS, and Elastic Container Service and don't have to manage any servers.
I'd go with GCE. They have a wide suite of services, and because they're the number three player right now, will probably give you a bunch of free credit to play with.
you should check out free tier offered by Amazon<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/free/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/free/</a><p>Also do apply for things like BizSpark
<a href="https://bizspark.microsoft.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bizspark.microsoft.com/</a><p>if you have a static marketing page, you can also host it for free ( almost ? ) on
<a href="https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/" rel="nofollow">https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/</a>
Don't trust anybody who doesn't start with "it depends". For nothing in this world there is one perfect answer. Context means a lot. What have you coded? Why do you think you are done if it is not running anywhere (I would say you are 20% done if it runs on your laptop)? How many people need to use it to be viable (e.g. a diary service needs only one user who writes texts for himself, a shop needs at least make its hosting and transportation fees, a social network needs thousands of people before it can even start to be successful)?<p>Good general advice is this: The simplest solution is often the best, but in some cases that means taking your old desktop pc, install ubuntu, configure your router to publicly share http and https from that computer. In other cases it means using a toolset like Heroku.<p>Please don't be mad about this, but the way you phrase your question it is very very likely you have so little skill that you don't even know how little. Please consider to pay a freelancer to support you. He likely has more skill and has experienced more "this can never happen in real life" F-Ups than you, and therefore can handle a lot.
I'm going to have to be the boring guy and say: depends completely on how much resources you need.<p>In most cases though (brace yourself for an unpopular opinion) it's enough to setup a simple dedicated server for about $20-$60 per month.<p>Now I did read the comments that mentioned how getting a dedicated server is a waste of valuable time, but honestly you'll most probably be able to get it setup in a day, you'll also learn how web servers work along the way and you won't have to depend on third-party cloud services (yet).<p>Here's a great guide from DigitalOcean on how to setup a modern dedicated HTTP server with MYSQL: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-on-ubuntu-12-04" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...</a>
Check out webfaction <a href="https://www.webfaction.com/?aid=9281" rel="nofollow">https://www.webfaction.com/?aid=9281</a>. It's cheaper/better than shared/heroku/dedicated/vps/ec2 up until a certain point (48GB ram).
If you are willing to shell out a little more ($40), you can get a pretty powerful DS for a fraction of the cost of what the major cloud providers would cost: <a href="https://www.delimiter.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.delimiter.com</a>
Check out Digital Ocean Hatch[1]. If you're an eligible startup, you can get 100K of free credits for 12 months.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/</a>
Can you give us an idea of what your site is built in? Personally I have a side project I am working on which I am just hosting on the free allocation of AWS. Even if it weren't in the free tier, it would be extremely inexpensive. With that, I have a lot of experience deploying to AWS and I have scripted most of the process (in fact, other than some monitoring, at this point, the deployment process is entirely automated). This would work for just about any architecture. But, the difficulty of setup will cause your mileage to vary a bit.
I can comment on AWS, EC2 (ECS where docker kicks in if you want it). To set it up via UX Amazon Console was absolutely confusing and continues poor user experience until we moved to AWS-cli which was very time consuming and then the setting up of docker which just ate a big chunk of our time.<p>Strongly recommend to go for something simpler and lightweight to reduce the time waste as lots of other comments suggest.<p>At the end of the day you don't even know if anyone wants your product or what first user's opinion is, why waste time on shiny host set-up?
It depends on how much you want to do yourself.<p>Heroku is easiest and relatively cheap until you scale. (Great problem)<p>Lots of people seem to use AWS. My limited understanding is that it is marginally more difficult to implement than heroku.<p>You could also go with someone like Linode. I would only go that route if you have implemented before. There is a learning curve and if you are trying to get the site up quick, I would go with a different option.
Redhat offers free services (you pick which ones) via their OpenShift [0] platform. Under the covers it's Docker and Kubernetes.<p>[0] <a href="https://developers.openshift.com/getting-started/index.html?sc_cid=701600000011p9xAAA&gclid=CMbt7eWnzs8CFdcSgQod5k0HDQ" rel="nofollow">https://developers.openshift.com/getting-started/index.html?...</a>
As people asked, what do you need "today" (host website apparently) and what do you need "tomorrow"? If you just need a simple static-ish web app, and everything else is your offline iOS game that's pretty different from building say a Snapchat competitor.<p>Full disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, but it's unclear you need a cloud provider.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but Redhat's Openshift provides an alternative to Heroku. I've used it for a few years and been happy with it. They have a startup program that gives you access to a paid tier for a year. I've used Openshift to host Node and Flask apps.<p>Edit: a bunch of downvotes for trying to be helpful, how nice.
If you're talking about hosting your startup's landing page, stick with Github Pages: <a href="https://pages.github.com/" rel="nofollow">https://pages.github.com/</a>. Free, super quick & easy, with custom domains to boot.<p>Personally, for almost any product I start here. Even if you do need server-side infrastructure for the product, hosting all your marketing pages on GH pages is probably the right choice - they're going to be better at reliably hosting and serving static content than you are. Focus on your product instead.<p>When I do need server-side logic I then usually go for Digital Ocean, because they're very cheap, pretty great, and far less complicated to manage than EC2. It's also pretty easy to set up Dokku: <a href="https://medium.com/@pimterry/host-your-node-app-on-dokku-digitalocean-1cb97e3ab041#.4idyklakq" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@pimterry/host-your-node-app-on-dokku-dig...</a>. With that on top you then get a quick & effective Heroku-style deployment experience, at a fraction of the price.
why can't you use just aws micro free t1? they give you a micro machine for 1 year free. what loads do you anticipate, what hw requirements do you need for your machine? i think hosting a simple website with sqlite database works great on an aws micro, if you need something more glorified like postgresql or mysql and multi-tier, then perhaps you should go for something like digital ocean or paid aws, this all depends on your requirements which you haven't specified.<p>currently i'm hosting a golang web + restful api + websocket server + sqlite3 db + redis + nginx all on a single micro AWS server, but my marketing hasn't really started yet, we're talking about <100 hits thus far per day.
Do you have any special requirements -- such as location, high memory, io performance, or storage capacity?<p>At <a href="https://mnx.io" rel="nofollow">https://mnx.io</a> (my company) we offer various options with reliability, and performance at our foundation.
Clever cloud is a good option, they're very good at what they're doing. Plans start low, and you can scale easily when needed.
They do have plenty of options, and support is top notch.
We are super happy with Firebase. Even if you just use the static hosting you get CDN + HTTPS for free. And you can even use the free tier as long as you want which is awesome for low traffic.
if looking into digitalocean, vultr.com is slightly better in terms of pricing and processors, though it takes much longer (~2-3mins) to spin up a vm instead of <60s in digitalocean
now.sh <a href="https://zeit.co/now/" rel="nofollow">https://zeit.co/now/</a> and surge.sh <a href="https://surge.sh" rel="nofollow">https://surge.sh</a> are some lesser-known options that I've used recently with ease and success (on free plan, for small projects).
Cheap: browse through the listings on lowendbox.com, you will find some amazing deals for both VPS and dedicated servers.<p>Reliable: AWS / Rackspace / DigitalOcean / Google cloud / basically any famous one.<p>When you're starting, it's probably better to rent a cheap VPS server. If you start growing fast, you can always move to the cloud. But modern cheap VPSs are quite powerful. I have 7 websites running on one that costs me $6/month.