[TriLUG] Any recommendations for cheap "cloud" hosting?

[Aaron Joyner via TriLUG]

I realize I'll sound like a company shill, but http://cloud.google.com is
both a very-cheap and super-flexible option.  :)  For me, it's what I've
wanted but couldn't have until very recently: the ability to run my
public-facing toy projects on the amazing infrastructure I spend all day
building and scaling.

For comparison to some of the other options on this thread, a small (512MB
of ram) VPS (virtual private server), similar to what you get from Digital
Ocean, runs about $3.88 per month
<https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=18ad3b20-f512-494e-bf95-965aea396277>.
It's billed per-minute, so if you decide you don't like it after the first
week of tinkering with it, you've only spent $1.28
<https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=b1edcb7a-9359-4d62-aebc-eeb935f479b6>.
In fact, if you just want to get started tinkering with it, and you only
need one of those, it's actually free <https://cloud.google.com/free/>.

The part I love is that if you decide next week you need to upgrade that
virtual machine to have 4 CPUs, 15GB of RAM, add a 100TB of SSD storage,
it's no big deal.  It takes about 5 minutes of clicking around in the web
UI, or a few commands.  The billing rate goes up, but it's really easy to
just "throw resources at the problem" if that's the right short-term answer
for scaling.  If you want to scale it out horizontally, and put it a few
dozen or hundred of these instances behind a globally load balanced
address, that's really just a few more clicks in the web UI.  That might
seem gratuitous and unnecessary, but starting with a cheap toy-sized
server, and then upgrading it in place to a 1- or 2-CPU machine with a
couple GBs of ram only when the workload actually warrants it, has turned
out to be a very sensible model.

As a caveat... if you're shoveling around tremendous amounts of bandwidth,
and you can live with their serving locations, you're probably better off
with Digital Ocean (because they don't meter it, yet).  If you want to
develop on ARM, check out Scaleway.  AWS also offers a "free tier" instance
for the first 12 months.

Best of luck investigating,
Aaron S. Joyner


On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 11:23 AM, Warren Myers via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org
> wrote:

> I use Digital Ocean.
>
> On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 1:57 PM, Mike Shaw via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi Everyone,
> >
> > I was looking at playing around with my own "cloud" host versus one at
> home
> > and wanted to see if anyone has any recommendations for cheap online
> > hosting just for playing?
> >
> > I had found this site(http://www.97cents.net/) but wanted to see if
> anyone
> > had any thoughts.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Mike Shaw
> > ---
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>
>
>
> --
> *Warren Myers*
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> https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=d197a961987a
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