Ask HN: Best public cloud for small websites?

by eslaughton 8/26/2024, 1:37 AMwith 23 comments

With AWS now charging for IPv4 addresses, my reserved instance for a small personal website is no longer anywhere near as cheap as it used to be.

I was going to go back to Linode (which I had used previously), but it seems they've been acquired.

What do people recommend these days? I'm in the US and would (probably) prefer a US-based service, but feel free to answer for different localities (so this can perhaps be useful to others).

In my case, the site in question is a random name generator. Compute/bandwidth requirements should be near zero, so I'm mostly optimizing for cost, reliability and non-shadiness: https://random-name.org/

by IAmGraydonon 8/27/2024, 4:27 PM

I'm still using Linode (have been for around 10 years). Everyone acts like being acquired is some kind of cancer or something, but I don't see a reason to leave. Their pricing is the same as their only real competitor (DigitalOcean) and they just made a nearly $50M investment into upgrading their infrastructure. If they start slipping in terms of offerings, price or customer service, I may move to DO. Until then, I'm perfectly happy with them.

by remramon 8/26/2024, 3:04 AM

Amazon/Google/Oracle free tiers should be good for a small project. It does include an IPv4.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/free-tier-faqs/

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu...

by cpachon 8/26/2024, 9:24 AM

These are the ones I would look into: Fly, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Tornado VPS, Vultr.

by jjiceon 8/26/2024, 2:45 PM

Another +1 for Digital Ocean. Been using them for years for basic VPS services. $6 flat gets you a simple VM and $4 gets you one with half (I think) the specs, but it could be fine for really simple stuff.

Nice and simple UI.

by aborsyon 8/28/2024, 8:57 AM

If it’s a static website, S3 has “use for static website “ option. You can put cloud front in front of it and the cost normally would be pennies.

But there is a small risk of DDoS or similar passing through their basic protections, and suddenly a huge bill!

by architectfwdon 8/26/2024, 2:13 AM

What is your web stack? Is it possible to put it on S3 with cloudfront in front?

by pestatijeon 8/26/2024, 1:52 AM

non-shadiness: would u please explain?

they dont offer full cloud services, but if you can accommodate, Railway (https://railway.app/) has served me well

by askzon 8/26/2024, 3:37 PM

Doprax.com is built on top of hetzner/digitalocean/ovh/vultr and has nice auto-deploy functions from github ! And accepts lots of payments options

by catherinecodeson 8/28/2024, 8:58 PM

Check out Hetzner (Germany) and Entrywan (US). They have good prices and a no-nonsense approach.

by nicbouon 8/27/2024, 8:29 AM

DigitalOcean has been rock solid for a decade for me.