Where to Host a Fullstack Project on a Budget 

Lmao I've never seen someone make small talk as an intro to a youtube video.

this is incredible advice. thanks so much for laying down some real talk 🙇🏻

i loved AWS until they sent me a bill.

This is so helpful thanks! I am mostly a frontend dev and am wanting to start a backend project soon, didn't know about these options.

"Had a weird sore throat problem" our boi got the rona first...

This video is extremely helpful! It answered all my questions: "Where to host API?", "Where to host frontend?", "Where to host db?". Thanks a lot Ben!

very high quality content (as always!), thanks Ben!

Thank you Ben, really like how you offer real value in your vids. Lebanese here too brother.

0:51 Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) 3:37 Cloud provider cons 4:45 Which cloud provider to choose? 5:27 Alternatives to cloud providers 6:12 Alternative #1: Hosting your database + backend 13:47 Alternative #2: Hosting your frontend 15:17 Alternative #3: Handling user-uploaded images

I know I'm late, but I've ALWAYS used DigitalOcean for my hosting. They also provide things like CDNs and databases as services too, but their base servers are really cheap. I've been running my private email server for at least a couple years now, and because of low traffic, I only spend five dollars a month, and I love it.

First 30 seconds of this video had me imagining a delectable Thanksgiving meal -- not what I would expect from a software video, but extremely welcome

This video was a perfect opportunity to plug affiliate links everywhere, but you didn't. Glad to see your focus is on providing value rather than making quick bucks off of shilling.

I like that there is no sponsorship here, the video is much more genuine. And I was considering vultr but it seemed to good to be through, didn't expect to come across it here again, so I'll definitely look into that more.

Absolutely valuable stuff, thanks for sharing your knowledge

Great comparing of VPS and hosts! Did not know about imgix previously. I may consider switching to it from Cloudinary for my currently ongoing project. I only need it to server avatars to end users in two dimensions (not much of transformations, not much of bandwidths) but, am expecting to have a lot of users in future. Thus, hosing images on Google storage and and serving 'em through imgix might be cheaper optimistically doing the calculation. Anyway, will do more in-depth analysis and see. Thank you, Ben for all!

These type of videos are gold please make more of these

Great video. Surely will be helpful for a lot of people. Really appreciate the unbiased review.

Bro you are the king for this lol. I swear you can't find this information anywhere else

Very informative and got to know some more options when deploying backend and database services 👍

Really good resource of knowledge young man. Thank you!

Awesome video! I personally love netlify as well for static sites. Dropping docker containers onto digital ocean has been really nice as well.

Love your vids. Genuine and honest

This is really some great advice, thank you!

Hey Ben! Great video! I agree what you said about hosting on these cloud platforms. It gets very complex and you are bound to the one you choose. I also find it more valuable to have a deeper knowledge in deploying projects, than an aws certificate. So your current setup is having your backend and server on digital ocean on one machine, using a cron work with dokku to backup your database every 24h and then the frontend on Netlify? It would also be cool to know how you would set up different staging envs. I hope I don't flood you with questions. I'm in the deployment stage and this is my first real time doing it! 🤠

I would like to thank you profusely for this!!

Great job man, love these breakdowns.

Great video, very helpful.Thank you very much!

Your voice is so soothing, it made me sleep

Great pieces of advice here. Thanks Ben.

Love your videos thanks for making them :)

This is actually REALLY GOOD advice.

Amazon Lightsail was created specifically to solve this problem. It's an AWS service with predictable and transparent pricing and a simplified UI for launching instances with minimal configuration. The smallest instance is dirt cheap- a flat fee of $3.50/month for 512 MB and 20 GB storage. By comparison, Digital Ocean's cheapest droplet starts at $5.

For deployment, I can highly recommend Zeit's Now. You can deploy docker containers as services (e.g. databases, APIs, etc.) or just push the project as-is (and Zeit will make their own container, running on their servers). They also offer DNS service, and you can easily deploy services and point them the domain(s) to new builds (also usable with Pull Request "staging" environments). I control all my domains, services and DNS through their CLI which also offers a "local" development for setting up your services and running them as they would run in the cloud, before you deploy.

Great video. I also like Firebase for FE development. It supports a database, storing images and hosting your website.

Thanks mate for such detailed video

Thanks ! Excellent comparative!

Only thing I think you could have mentioned is how some of the VPS providers will provide "shared hosting" and "dedicated VPS", which at first sounds strange as opposed to just renting a dedicated box. The providers can also be sneaky about disclosing this information and will hide it in fine print sometimes. However, the differences come down to the sharing of compute resources between virtual machines on the host. Some hosting providers will 'allocate' your box a certain amount of ram or CPU cores, but can also share these resources with other virtual machines on the host. This type shared hosting can be a huge downside if you are allocated a machine on a host where the other users are maxing out the hosts resources. One example of this is the contabo hosting service provider where they offer two different services being shared and a dedicated VPS. Other than that, good video! Very good insights into hosting options.

Some useful information. Currently, my method is to rent a low end VPS for under $20 pm upon which I load virtualmin control panel (free) and host my domains. I've used typeform (free tier) for some of my forms but found they do not convert well, so currently I'm using an EcWid store to sell my digital goods, which is much better at converting.

Been using SSDNodes for quite a while now. Switched to European Data centre recently and I’m quite happy with their service. Never needed their support though.

Love these talks 👌

Great video Ben. The only thing I would like to note is that you made it look like the big cloud companies (AWS, Google, Azure) don't have VPS. I know you know they do, but the wording and video structure infers that they don't because you only showed the managed services and not EC2, Compute Engine or Azure VM. Even if they are usually more expensive than other VPS like DO. About image resizing, I didn't use either service but Cloudinary pricing looks way better. If 1 credit = 1k transforms then you get up to 25k transforms for free. Where imgx you have to pay from $3 (1k) to $75 (25k). At least for images Cloudinary looks better.

I'm just a newbie data analyst that has never touched cloud services before. No idea what I'm doing here. Great video!

No one: The captions: “I am half eleven knees”

Awesome video! Would definitely like more deployment videos

I came here for genuine advice and was surprised to see you as the first video. A sexy and helpful King

Heroku is great and Linode is great AWS and Azure shines on bigger and more complex use cases such as very uneven loadspikes

What a great video, thanks you ❤️

That is a handy video. Great job

Would be interested in seeing you deploying a project to one of these services, setting up the front end, backend and database. Also would like to see the Cron job that backs up to aws.

This is great content and advice

I don't know if somebody answered your question about 2 last image cloud servces and I don't see problems of calculation (mb I am wrong but not) so 1 credit on first one for 1000 resize (lets not calc data transfer in this case) and for 89$ you get 225 credits and 1 credit = 1000 operations 89/225 = 0.39555 or 0.4 per 1000 ops and second one cost 3$ per the same amount but it's has cheaper data transfer only 3 cents but any way images has no more the 10 MB average size so in worth case if each image 10MB for you will spend 11 credits for (upload and resize image - and much more less to get cropped) ok here is the math first one service 11 credits per 1000 files with size 10mb = ~4.4 second one 3+0.3 = 3.3 which cheaper but with less avg size of image first one became more cheaper my English is very easy (sorry if something not understandable)

Great stuff! Also checkout now.sh where you can host static websites: NextJS, React, Gatsby, PHP and pretty much more. Heck you can even build a cloud function (or lambda) that processes your images ala imgix/cloudinary there

Self hosting is pretty easy and you can do it using an old computer lying around at your home. It doesn't scale very well, but for small proofs of concept, it's the best bang for the buck.

I find the mLab free tier really useful when I'm at the very beginning of a development. I can have a development database up and running really quick this way.

Yeah. Serving image assets and having dynamic sizing of it is a bit of a headache to setup. I also haven't had much luck for setting up myself performance-wise. Cloudinary does have a good offer. But as Ben said, the threshold will keep you awake at night and the price could scale without you knowing why.

Can you do a tutorial on the virtual machines you have set up to run and backup your apps? I’ve yet to come across this content and I think it’d be a both an original and useful video

You’re so nice I can’t even 😂

firebase as a simple and free tier "spark" and it's good for some demos

I love Linode, which has great customer service.

Hey Ben, love you’re videos! I’m from Israel ✌️&❤️

Great content, thanks!

I found ImageKit as a really cool image handler. Thanks for the video.

Very interesting and informative. Love 💕💕💕💕💕 bro

Would love to see an update to this video for 2021!

MacStadium. Can you do a vid on the best way to store documents in a DB for retrieval over the net?

For storing images, I suggest using Digitalocean Storage.

i think editing your videos by adding some images of the service you are talking about or summerizing with some text on screen would make them even better. anyways thanks for the advice, i really enjoy listening to you

Vultr for the win always, having used GCP and AWS, I cannot recommend another VPS service. The difference between them and others is their network speed has been unmatched, when setting up your OS

Personally using Hetzner Cloud. Doesn't have as much out of the box features like aws/digital ocean, but it's one third of the price.

AMAZING man, this is one the most value added videos I've seen regarding cloud deployments. What would be a good option in order to host a Postgresql Database? thanks!

I need a 2023 version of this

Hi Ben, Thanks for sharing such amazing explanation. Can I ask you your opinion about hosting on Heroku? I have few experience deploying on the cloud and I found that Heroku makes the deployment very easy and it has a free & hobby plan which in my opinion it's great for creating proof of concepts. Love your videos man, all the best. Regards, Max

Thanks for the video! You mentioned you tried to set up your own assets/image manager service. Did you use thumbor? If not how did you did it? How bad was the performance compared to imgix or cloudinary?

How can I know if my react app will be able to function in 100GB bandwidth on netlify or it would need more?

I've been using DigitalOcean for ~3 years now, I found it to be cheap but effective.

Thanks for this! I would've liked to hear what you think for large file storage also (like zips of 25-500mb, etc), but it was fairly thorough anyways.

Ben, can you make a video to show practically, how to deploy & manage a project Backend/Frontend/DB/Images, between all this services Usually I choose a hosting plan to host it all in one place

Amazing, merit and clear content! Thank you!

"Had a weird sore throat problem..." This video was posted on Jay Z's birthday, on December 4th. Coronavirus only hit 4 months later. The last United States president was the 44th. Jay Z's latest solo album was 4:44. Ben is in the Illuminati. He was dropping hints the whole time.

Dang dude you say Kibbeh like an American. 😆 Edit: Also half Lebanese. Much love my dude.

Awesome!! Just Awesome!!

Awesome video

About what size instance would you look for to host an api/graphql server and redis?

great video - thanks! What is your take on using Firebase in terms of cost?

Haha, here I was hoping there was something obviously better than AWS serverless free tier but I guess I'll stick to it for now. AWS Amplify CLI with cloudformation seems pretty nice after all, have you tried that Ben? I find the AWS Console pretty horrible but I've been using some guides that used it to get started.

Suppose i made a mern app then do I have to host my frontend and backend separately on separate serves

Vercel is a very nice alternative for Netlify

hi, i have an android app. I have around 300 active users per day and a total user of around 1000+ so for hosting my server and MySQL database which VPS should be good and budget-friendly?

Which is the most transparent service? AWS amplify tutorial does some things I don't understand and I don't like that.

Useful! thank you

I like to use Scaleway (cheaper than vultr and DO)

recently used firebase..it's nice for side projects but my issue is that it only has NoSQL DB, do you know any other alternative that provides free hosting of frontend, backend and db?

Very Honest Talk

Hi Ben! How do you manage the security?

Thank you, bro.

What about Firebase? It has a generous free tier and handles most everything on the same service, hosting, database, data storage, cloud functions. I don't know how quickly it becomes expensive, but using it is very enjoyable.

@Ben Awad Have you also tried image resize with Nginx?

What is your opinion on shared hosting (like a2 hosting) with e.g. nodejs backend options

Thanks for this great unique tutorial. One question, what do you recommend for hosting and serving videos? For example, what if I wanted to create my own RU-vid.

Hey, watching this for what the video is, but off topic, im from Yucatan, Mexico and lebanese culture is strong here, due to a migration of lebanese people in the early 1900s, so kibbeh or kibis as they call them here, are a big thing man, so tasty and delicious. Anyways, thanks for the awesome content.