Where do you guys keep your projects? Is it in the cloud (Appfog, heroku, amazon) or in a traditional shared/dedicated server?
You keep both development and production in the same server?<p>What would you recomment for a freelancer developer looking to host his mid-size projects?
How about your own dedicated server that you can simply split up into multiple containers, with their own internal/external network? <a href="https://uptano.com" rel="nofollow">https://uptano.com</a> It was built for people who don't want to have to choose -- disclaimer: I helped start Uptano.<p>And yes, you should absolutely split up dev/prod servers (while keeping them as similar as possible).
Colo is great if you do enough work to justify the cost. Most of the cloud free-tiers and low-end machines are far cheaper if you are just doing one-offs and short-term development work on projects.<p>I've found that using the cloud forces me to be more responsible about having scripted operations procedures - which is great when clients come back after 5 months wanting minor changes - I can spin up a prod/dev server for their project with almost no overhead, and it wasn't cluttering up a colo server somewhere.<p>Nonetheless, if performance/cost ratio is a definite concern, colo is definitely the right decision.
Best of both, custom built private clouds across two datacenters via colocation.<p>I'd recommend building your own servers and colocating them. You can get a ~50 ECU, 32GB ECC RAM, SSD, etc for about 1k. You can colo by the RU in most major cities, which typically runs around $99 per month.<p>If you want any help, send me a line and I can walk you through it all. I not only this for my own company (~60 RUs of blades/traditional), but I also consult fairly often doing infrastructure for companies wanting to cut costs over things like AWS by 10x to 100x (yes, 100x happens sadly for them prior).
I was curious if you are using PaaS or something like. I like AppFog, where you can imidiatelly choose your 'container' and get started. So you can actually focus on the code side and in the server administration stuff.
Dedicated hosting at companies like Leaseweb is a good option if you are not sure of your cloud hosting performance. tell us a bit more about your app and requirements.