For most personal projects, hosting on the cloud may be overkill, but tempting with its supposed ease of use and benefits of scale. Self-hosting is often overlooked as a solution with the benefit of simplicity and cost.
Interesting discussion and demonstration of self hosting the kinds of apps most personal projects will end being.
A VPS is also very expensive though. And shared hosting usually only allows HTML and PHP. So what’s the affordable alternative?
Personally I self-host on a raspberry pi. It took me a few weeks to setup, but it has been running without problems for almost 2 years now at practically no cost (beyond purchase and electricity).
Great question. Here’s where I’ve landed:
- For a surprising number of things, my previous desktop, running Linux, confined to my local network, is perfectly fine.
- For a number of other things, a Raspberry Pi, with a dedicated disk image (ISO), confined to my local network, is fine.
- Surprisingly often, a not-at-all-dynamic dynamic DNS solution gets the job done. I follow the first half of the DynDNS guide, and then hard code my preferred IP, and skip the rest. It’s inconvenient when my IP changes, but that happens a lot less often than most folks imagine. Most DNS providers have provided this to me for free after I bought my domain name from through them.
- For my public personal portfolio, GitHub pages works fine.
- For additional silly static sites, AWS S3 and AWS CDN get the job done for about $3 per month.
- When I need to do public facing database stuff, I get a virtual private server, not from Amazon or Microsoft, who both way overcharge for small apps.
I was surprised to find oracle’s offerings so economical for personal use. I set up a foundry server (TTRPG) and so far it hasn’t cost me a cent. Still not a fan of them or their CEO, but this is working for me.
I use nearlyfreespeech.net. They bill for usage, and since my site gets almost no hits and doesn’t take much storage, it’s ridiculously cheap. Much cheaper than even he $2.50.mo VPS listed in another comment. I just checked, and I spend an average of $.30/mo.
Thanks for this; I signed up because of your comment
VPS’ are pretty cheap. Checkout https://buyvm.net starts at like 2.50$/mo
expensive
Highly disagree, but I realize expensiveness is subjective.
What is your definition of not cloud? Does anyone else’s VM count? So linode or digitalocean for example would be acceptable, or no?
I guess “alternative” is also subjective.
I’ve been looking for a place to host web apps in whatever language (Rust, Nim, or whatever) and framework I want, where I can use my own domains and multiple apps, and have sudo access. And I don’t want to pay $70/month for it. I gave up on that hunt (it might have been unrealistic), although I’ll be researching some of the alternatives offered in these comments.
Oracle VMs have a perpetual free tier. Even AWS’s non-free tier starts around $3/mo, similar for buyvm/DigitalOcean/linode/etc. There are MANY options that are way cheaper than $70… unless I misunderstood your requirements.
My ovh vps costs me 60€/y. Granted it’s low end specs. What would you need exactly?
Plenty of places with $5 per month VPS
With sudo access? Can you suggest some? I did tons of research and rarely found anything less than $70/month.
Yup, many are mentioned in the comments alongside mine. Linode is my option of choice.
