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Discussion on: How are you hosting your apps?

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jborak profile image
John • Edited

Since you have a variety of tools, languages, services and containers, I'd suggest some sort of virtualization over alternatives (app-engines like GAE or heroku).

LightSail may be a good option since the pricing is explicit but I think you'd get more using DigitalOcean.

For side-projects of mine that are mature and actually used, I host them on DigitalOcean. For the other side-projects that are half-baked, in dev, or hardly used, I self-host those on my computers at home.

If you want to self-host there are several options that make it easy. One of my mature side-projects (packetriot.com) is a system that lets me do just this. Here are several choices:

Serveo.net - Free, uses openssh as its client, basically does remote-local port forwarding, worth checking out first.

Ngrok.com - Freemium, uses a reverse tunnel, it has a built-in tool for saving and replaying HTTP respects, it was developed with webhook dev in mind but it can relay HTTP/HTTPS.

Packetriot.com - Freemium, this is my project, it uses reverse tunnels as well, the client has support for automatic Let's Encrypt, can host static content (no need for extra web servers), is containerized, can perform upstream service checks, monitoring and notification on failures, provides access on who is connecting to your tunnels, and a few other tricks.

There are more, but these are the most popular. Serveo is quick and easy to test out to try out the concept of self-hosting, so I would do that first. If you need more or want more features try the other two.

I actually host several sites and services, including a Gitlab, private file-hosting, Upspin server, and a bunch of static websites behind a packetriot tunnel.