Ask HN: Cheapest way to host a back end

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.

16 points | by Jean-Philipe 2 days ago

23 comments

  • toast0 2 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.

    [-]
  • TheKelsbee 2 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!

  • quintes 2 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?

  • JaggerJo 23 hours ago
    I really like fly.io, but you’d need to provide more information about the kind of backend and the expected load. Also what does it currently cost?

    I host a few sites on fly for pennies, but they don’t see a lot of traffic.

  • yonatan8070 1 day ago
    Everyone here is suggesting various cloud offerings, and that's probably the way to go.

    However, cheap used mini PCs from the likes of HP can be had for very little or even free if you find an office that's replacing them with new ones. Plop on of those at home, and your recurring costs are like 20W of power

  • ActorNightly 1 day ago
    If the initial effort can be big, all you really need to do is to move your API/Backend to API Gateway and Lambda (with throttling applied), then for databases, just get a dedicated EC2 instance and host stuff manually, with periodic syncs to S3 for backups.

    Most of AWS services exist because people are either too lazy or not knowledgeable enough on how to set up their own stuff on EC2.

  • dakiol 2 days ago
    Hijacking the thread: also looking for some super cheap VPS for running Go servers (don’t need more than 256-512 MB). I know i have digitalocean for ~$5/month, but i’m looking for something more like $1 or €2 per month.
    [-]
    • mobilio 2 days ago
      Huge list of providers in that price range

      https://lowendbox.com/

    • lbhdc 2 days ago
      I run a number of go servers with similar resource requirements on cloud run for free. I wanted them to be always on, so I set up an uptime check that keeps those instances alive around the clock without leaving the free tier.
  • rganesan 2 days ago
    Have you looked at Amazon Lightsail? It's relatively cheap if you don't need a lot of scale, compared to other cheap alternative. Oracle free tier is another option.
  • sachinkrs 2 days ago
    You can build your own backend server on https://console.hetzner.cloud/
  • icedchai 2 days ago
    Have you looked into optimizing your AWS costs? Where is most of it going? Compute, storage, bandwidth?
  • deployhq 14 hours ago
    DeployHQ+VPS (Hetzner, Vultr, DO, etc)
  • daemonologist 2 days ago
    Cheapest is to fit within someone's free tier (e.g. Oracle), but I'm leery of that. Personally I use Hetzner's cheapest US instance which is 5 EUR/month with an IPv4 address.
  • theli0nheart 1 day ago
    Surprised that no one has mentioned Google Cloud Run. I’ve started multiple services with it this year and it’s been awesome. Highly recommend.
    [-]
    • icedchai 1 day ago
      I've also really enjoyed my experienced with Cloud Run. It makes it super simple to deploy and scale containers.
    • johncole 1 day ago
      So happy to see this mentioned. I love google cloud run. I had to switch to azure for a while, but wasn’t as easy to use as gcr
  • chistev 2 days ago
    Pythonanywhere, Render.
  • yen223 2 days ago
    Supabase + Cloudflare Workers, both have pretty generous free tiers
  • billconan 2 days ago
    I'm paying $0.45 for my personal lambda/dynamodb based service. but my traffic is very low.
  • yeyeyeyeyeyeyee 2 days ago
    Get some cloud servers at Hetzner, you'll get what you need for XX euros per month.
  • dith3r 2 days ago
    Oracle cloud has free tier with 4 arm vcpus/24G ram/200GB SSD.
    [-]
    • runjake 2 days ago
      Some good questions to ask in this case:

      - How long will this last?

      - What's in it for Oracle?

      Oracle is not known for its benevolence or free services. Quite the opposite.

      [-]
      • lbhdc 2 days ago
        > What's in it for Oracle?

        Customer acquisition, like all companies with a free tier. It lets people experiment with their products and see if it meets their needs. Maybe those experiments grow up to be real products and continue running where they are. Maybe that user becomes an advocate for that product to their employer.

      • dith3r 1 day ago
        Right now there is no date when this free offer will disappear. For 3 yr I m using it.
      • icedchai 2 days ago
        Also keep in mind there's a lot more talent available to work with AWS, GCP, and Azure.
  • ecesena 1 day ago
    Google app engine, you can run for free.
  • tumidpandora 2 days ago
    Lightsail on AWS, fixed pricing
  • revskill 1 day ago
    Localhost.
  • fefferkorn 2 days ago
    depending on the performance you need (and ofc region).. for eu i can recommend: 1&1, (they have 1€ vps), hetzner, alphavps
  • W6zVktFA 2 days ago
    Elestio