I've noticed that most ecommerce online stores are hosted on Shopify nowadays, as I noticed from this post:
How about other kinds of websites created by the freelancers and digital agency owners of this community? Do you host on shared hosts? Or VPS providers such as Digital Ocean? Or Cloud services such as AWS?
The most challenging part (for me) about VPS providers and cloud services is the management of your servers across different services, once the number of your servers goes past 4 or 5.
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We have been doing AWS for a few years and are generally happy with it. Simple things are simple and more complex things are possible, and with the move to serverless we get both piece of mind and wallet.
Most of our sites are SPAs with little backend so I think for many sites we could do netlify or similar, but AWS allows us to stay flexible in case requirements change.
Use a VPS and setup flynn.io or captainduckduck.com
Awesome recommendations David, I'll try them out for sure.
Wow, $70 does seem excessive! Does AWS at least provide a proper audit trail for the costs? If I got an excessive bill like that, I would be worried whether my AWS keys got leaked somehow. xD
I've also been looking into Heroku. For a client project it might be fine, but it seems quite cost-prohibitive for side-projects. US$25 for a 512MB RAM Dyno is quite a lot when you could get a similar sized droplot from Digital Ocean for US$5
Heroku does seem VERY convenient though, which is probably where the premium pricing comes in.
I thought about this recently, and the approach that I would do personally is setup a GitHub premium account with private repositories and then host the sites through Netlify.
Thanks for the tip Meghan. Another team at my workplace does use Netlify for static website mockups, but I'm not quite sure about their offerings for dynamic sites... Their marketing copy mentions dynamic sites, but their docs seem to mention
my-static-websiteextensively...Remember that a static front end doesn't have to mean a "static" user experience. A single page front end application consisting of HTML, CSS, and JS can very still be dynamic, data driven, and engaging without sacrificing whole page cache-ability. This is my architecture of choice for all consumer-facing sites.