Hacker Remix

Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

18 points by Jean-Philipe 5 days ago | 35 comments

I'm about to help transitioning a mobile app to a charity and need the API to be hosted as cheaply as possible. I don't expect it to scale super big, but there has to be some level of scalability. Initial effort can be bigger, what's important are the running costs. Ideally it should be low maintenance, not a lot of development is going to happen on the code base. It's nodejs with postgres.

Right now we're on AWS which is crazy expensive, and I'm thinking about going to vercel but can't really estimate how much it will be with equal performance.

toast0 4 days ago

You can easily get a VPS for around $5/month from quality vendors. You can probably find a lot of offers around $1/month for a VPS on lowendbox, lowendtalk, and webhostingtalk.

If you want more oomph than that, you can find dedicated server offers at those three places, starting around maybe $30/month. Typically pretty old systems, but I enjoy having a whole ancient box rather than one core in a vm on a modern box. My personal hosting needs are tiny though, so I could fit back into the VPS if money were an issue.

digianarchist 3 days ago

Like AWS Lightsail?

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

jasonthorsness 3 days ago

I’ve been using Lightsail (mostly because I use AWS for a ton of stuff at work) and it has been great. No complaints.

TheKelsbee 4 days ago

Hi! AWS Developer Advocate here. Depending on the nonprofit/charity status it's possible they could qualify for free or reduced price hosting. There are a few different programs that you could qualify for.

There is also the Techsoup organization, which helps nonprofits and charities with technology needs: https://page.techsoup.org/amazon-web-services-for-nonprofits

I would highly recommend looking through there for not just AWS specific tools & services, but a wide variety of solutions that might help this charity.

Please feel free to reach out directly to me for additional assistance. Hope this helps!

dtnewman 1 day ago

AWS lambda + API gateway. I use serverless to deploy to these.

If traffic is high, this could get pricy. For example, i have a site up getting about 20,000k visitors a day, hitting it many times each and it's probably costing me $400/month whereas a $50 server would probably do the trick (it's a temporary thing that i'm migrating away soon). But I have a bunch of smaller projects with a few visitors a day and the cost rounds to $0.

The nice thing is that it'll basically scale infinitely when you need it to.

quintes 5 days ago

What’s the stack?

Why is AWS expensive? What’s the most costly?

Why vercel? I’ve heard it gets costly at scale here on HN no other data points.

Does the charity have the ability to operate it? Budget? Skills? If not what the plan?

babyent 10 hours ago

Vercel is honestly meant for enterprise. The free/cheap tier is a cool toy. Vercel replaces the need to build out an expensive dedicated UI deployment/tooling team (like when your org has like 50 product teams working on a large enterprise saas).

Anyone else should just stick to vite react starter SPA and actually make money first. If they need SEO, they can use something simple too.