How makers stay productive

I'll begin:

Makerlog and Opsbot's API is hosted on DigitalOcean, on the $5/mo tier. Very cheap yet effective…

Makerlog and Opsbot's frontend is hosted on Netlify, on the free tier. That way I get Netlify's awesome benefits + reduce API server load.

Here's today on my DO $5/mo instance, handling Makerlog's traffic + realtime:

Not too bad! There's been a few traffic spikes from Product Hunt and an unusually high CPU usage for a while but overall, it's been fine.

I'm very impressed to how this small instance has handled my products, and I don't see the need to upgrade in the foreseeable future :)

Yea same here, I'm also using Digitalocean to host my projects. I use 2 droplets, one for the backend, one for the frontend. I use Digitalocean Spaces with CDN for the static content. I use cloudflare for free HTTPS.

I'm using DigitalOcean, too. $5 droplet is pretty impressive. 6 different Rails apps (puma server), 5 Sidekiq instances, 6 static sites, PostgreSQL database, Nginx web server. Backblaze B2 for backups. Mailgun for transactional emails. Sentry for error tracking.

I haven't shipped any products yet, planning to ship my first product in January 2019. However, I have worked on a couple of client projects in the past. Here, is an overview of my hosting choices over the years:

Nov 2018 onwards (playing with this setup now)

Hosting: Netlify's Free Tier (Free hosting, Free SSL & Free custom domain)

API & Computing: AWS Lambda (paired with API Gateway)

Cost: Can't say! Both are running on Free tier and I haven't deployed production apps yet.

Final Word: The most cost-effective setup till now. In earlier setups, I at least had to pay for custom domains. In addition to that, everything is managed or automated so I have to just code, test, deploy and test again :D I got up and running after spending a day learning to use Lambda and API Gateway.

2014 - 2016

During this time, I did a few client projects with a few friends. Based on their request, we either hosted their site/app on their own AWS account or other hosting providers. If they had no clue about hosting, we hosted their sites on our AWS account.

Hosting:

1. EC2 micro instance (for dynamic websites, APIs etc.)
2. S3 (for static sites)
3. Hosting providers like GoDaddy. BigRock etc

Cost:

1. We hosted 7 static sites, 8 sites with cms+database on our AWS account. If I remember correctly, the monthly fee never exceeded $25/month (non-free tier) for all the websites combined. Most of this fee was due to Route 53's fee of $0.35/month/domain. Please note, these are websites of regional businesses that receive less than 15 visitors per day (extremely low traffic).

2. We also deployed a local food delivery app on AWS. They are available on both iOS and Android, and they serve an average of 160 orders/day. Their monthly AWS bill ranges between $70-$90/month.

3. Rest of our clients had their own hosting.

Final Word: If you're a freelancer or a web development agency and have clients who rely on you for everything, from text change to photo uploads (trust me there are many such folks), having your own hosting infrastructure on AWS or DigitalOcean is profitable if you're willing to put in the service and maintenance hours. We grew detached from such work and didn't want to continue in that direction so I migrated most of the client sites to managed hosting providers. Currently, I am serving just 4 sites… over Netlify :p

2012 - 2014

Ah! the dark ages :D

Hosting: Freehostia for static sites, dynamic sites, and cms-based sites.

Cost: Free and No Ads on the website.

Final Word: Use Netlify :p

@kerr niceee :D functions? @jkostolansky I really like your setup - it's quite impressive!

Overall, Netlify seems to be killing it!

I host on Azure and it costs me about $100/mo for 10 LIVE sites plus their DEV environments. This includes Web, Storage, SQL Databases and SendGrid.

Why Azure? @micahiverson Used to use it (got a MS BizSpark credit for a yr) but I disliked Azure quite a lot

@sergio, I am in pretty deep with Microsoft Stack, so Azure is just the logical choice. It's easy, fast, stable and fits in the pipeline. Azure back during BizSpark years is quite a bit different than it is now, they have done a ton of work and support almost every type of language, database, tech stack you want.

I have always found Amazon's platform hard to use, I was on Rackspace for years but that got to be a pain to use and then they sold off their "Cloud Sites" service to some other terrible provider.

Selldom.io is on Digital Ocean, I find that confusing and hard to use as well, when I finish the rebuild it will be moved to Azure.

I have a few "shared hosting" servers for really small sites or WordPress since it's easy and cheap.

As a UI guy, Azure makes it easy to work with, I'm not a big Command Line guy so get frustrated if that is the primary way to work with a server.

@yoginth,

Godaddy(.in domain $4/Month) - Domain Registration

why do you pay a monthly fee for the domain name?

I use the Heroku free tier to quickly spin up builds to send them to friends for feedback or to demo something.

For static/simple projects (I do some freelance webdev on the side) I have a $5/month instance on Digital Ocean. It's currently hosting 6 websites but they barely have any traffic because most of them are small local businesses.

I have one project that's in alpha right now on another $5/month instance on Digital Ocean. I choose to put it on its own droplet because it scrapes different web stores and saves pricedata.

This was very useful to read -- thanks for posting it. As someone who's fairly new to modern web deployment, it's hard to know where to start.

Does Netlify allow you to use jQuery .load() to load pages into another page?

Currently, I've been shopping around. I just signed up for Netlify. They had me at FREE 😂. I'm in the early stages of Mindful - gotta keep cost low or zero. Unfortunately, after deploying my site, I realized that static pages mean no PHP files not "simple" or "little PHP code" to define environment vars, include the global header, footer, and switch button text 🙄. So my so-called static site gotta be updated before I can use Netlify.

My setup

• hosting: DreamHost $10.95/ mo
• domains: Namecheap: $240/yr
• email: Google Apps: Free aka grandfathered in ;-)
• repo: Bitbucket: Free

I got a DO account but I don't know what the hell that site says half the time. Any tips or articles for beginners that uses lamen terms that explains how to us DO would be greatly appreciated. 👍🏾

I appreciate you guys sharing your setup. 👌🏾