Making a Side Project, Part 10: Hosting Options
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Selecting a home for your side project
Have you read Part 9 of the Making a Side Project series?
As I work on finishing up the coding for Deaton, it’s time to think about where we are going to host when we’re ready.
Hosting websites has gotten much easier, and cheaper over the last few years. Virtual computing has lowered the costs and removed many of the administrative headaches of simple, affordable and scaleable hosting.
The options fall into 3 main categories:
- Cloud computing services such as AWS or Azure
- Virtual Private Servers such as DigitalOcean or Linode
- Platform as a Service, such as Heroku
There are other hosting options that exist, but feel these are the most appropriate solutions, so I’m going to focusing on picking one of these three.
Cloud computing services
Cloud computing companies provide a collection of independent services that can be used together for your web application.
From load balancer, to server containers, to databases, to file storage and many more, you are free to use as many or as few as you want run your website. Additionally, they provider a layer of network services that you can use to securely connect all the services they provide.
Companies like Amazon, and Microsoft have invested huge amounts of money in the infrastructure to power these services. You are able to use these services at a fraction of the cost it would take to setup and run them yourself. You can start small and scale your usage as your application grows.
While running the services can be very cheap, there is a administrative cost to setup and maintain the services you need to operate your application.
Virtual Private Servers
Rather than providing a complete suite of services, some companies have focused on offering high performance virtual servers. Built primarily for developers they provide quick and easy mechanism to setup affordable Linux instances. The instances are offered in predefined configurations for many popular Linux distros, suitable for hosting…
