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Not a rant, but maybe someone can help me on this one.

I am currently working on an app that will hopefully go live by the end of the year. Up to now, the webserver and database (for the REST API) is running on an old linux machine. However, as my ISP is not really reliable I want to move this stuff somewhere else. Has someone experience with the varios hosting providers? Currently I am a little bit overwhelmed by all the different solutions out there.

Ideally I would want something that doesn't cost very much now, but also scales with more users.

To make it more concrete, it's basically about neo4j + REST API in Python

Can somehow recommend anything? I really appreciate it, as I am currently a little bit lost on this.

Thanks for reading this!

Comments
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    digitalocean isn't bad, you would have to make your own autoscaling system on it but I'm working on one for my business and it's not as hard as you would figure for single sites
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    I say make your own autoscaling cause that's the only thing aws ec2 instances has over digital ocean
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    many thanks for the suggestions so far!

    Sorry for the dumb question, but is there an advantage over putting the webserver and the database on separate instances? On my local development system I put the webserver and the database on the same system but now I am thinking about whether it makes sense to put them on separate instances. Does that make sense? Or is that something that one should only consider for later?
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    We use Vultr for our primary servers and overall they've been pretty good. We use DigitalOcean for backup and they are good too. I'd say DigitalOcean is a little bit more reliable but you get more bang for your buck with Vultr and the instances are a good amount faster.

    The biggest thing I've learned though, with these cloud hosts since they all have their issues, is to make sure you set up some good monitoring and if possible some redundancy. They all have their issues, even AWS, so it's important to monitor closely.
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    @schluchti mainly for if you need to scale one part and not another, but it does make configuration management easier if they are on different servers. as much as I don't like telling people to put everything on one server it is a good way to try a idea out before you spend time working on infrastructure(load balencers) and configuration management(puppet,chef,ansible)
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    @schluchti yeah, you definitely want Neo4j on a separate instance. The first thing their support asks if you have issues is what other software might be competing with the Neo4j db. We run 3 instances, all with just Neo4j.
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    Wow guys, you are awesome. Thanks a lot!

    Will definitely look at Vultr..never heard about it before.

    @dfox many thanks for the info. In that case I will plan a separate instance for neo4j :)
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    @schluchti no problem, if you find out you want to use digital ocean and want autoscaling you would need to write a basic monitoring system that reads uptime, free, and df. other than that you just need a private api on a master system that parses the info to check if it can scale up or down. and on digital ocean you just use its api.

    vultur is nice I looked at it before, it has 768mb for $5 if I remember right and it has attachable storage (which is the reason I found it). only reason I use digital ocean over it was cause I ran a dd benchmark on vultur, DO and aws and DO was the fastest on my benchmark at the time
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    @dfox wow, this helps a lot with some doubts I was having between do and vultr for our new servers, thanks :))
  • 0
    DigitalOcean FTW. Sure Aws is cool, but it's expensive as fuck for what you get. Used Vultur before as well, nearly the same as DigitalOcean but I found DigitalOcean to be slightly better.
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    let me add to this , with DigitalOcean if you are a student ligiblw for github student pack you can get 50$ coupon , helps me test ideas out .
  • 0
    You have OVH too. I've used digital ocean and ovh and for my usage, it's the same.
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    And ovh seems to be cheaper with more better specs:
    https://ovh.com/us/vps/...
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    may I ask, where you live OP?
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    @schluchti If you dont have a github student developer account I can give you an referal link for digital ocean. You get free credit and can try it out:

    https://m.do.co/c/9b5c336f0363
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    Never heard of vultr. Do they have a data centre in Europe ?
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    We use DigitalOcean and Hetzner.
    Hetzners SSD VM's are super reliable.
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    You could take a look at Heroku.com I used it a while back and it had auto scaling built in.
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    @Michal78 yes they do .
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    Wow guys, many thanks for all the tips! I am currently trying out vultr and after that digital ocean. :)

    @Linux I am from Austria.
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    @schluchti
    servus! I recently visited austria actually :)

    Regarding servers, you might consider buying a server with some kind of 24/7 support.
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    @Linux hey cool, which part of Austria did you visit? Vienna?

    I also thought about buying a server but to be honest I am not sure about if that benefits me at the moment. I am not really sure if there is a place for the app and people will like it. As it is a hobby project, I want to keep the costs at a minimum. So I think a cloud based approach might currently a little bit better. :)
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    @schluchti
    Yeah, and the area around Krems.

    I can recommend a HP Proliant Microserver Gen8, fairly cheap and with RAID controller. :)
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    Hey guys,
    I just wanted to give you a quick update. As already said in a previous post I have tried out vultr. Up to now I am really happy with the it...three instances up and running and currently no problems. I still want to try out digital ocean, but as vultr works so smoothly I postponed that a little bit.

    I hope it's okay if I ask another question, but maybe someone can give me another tip. I am now looking for a mail provider, but again I am unsure which one I should pick. I recently read that google (gmail) has something for businesses. Has someone experience with that? I really want to avoid setting up/maintaining my own mail server.

    Any tips are really appreciated. thanks again!
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    @Linux that's nice...did you enjoy it?

    thanks for the tip, i'll definitely take a look at it.
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    @schluchti
    I did, took the car from Sweden with my family.

    Yeah do, I use it myself and I am really satisfied
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