I often hear stories about people dropping their side projects as soon as it costs them money to run. I've done it myself many, many times. Sometim...
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Yep.
The most expensive project I had was learning AWS. Their UI/UX is very ... bad at least, and I forgot some resources on different regions, cost me almost 100 dollars.
Side projects are either for learning, so I consider them investments in my career, hobby or to make more money, either way they are worth it. Ofc paying is the last option, I am a big fan of free tiers.
Cloudflare, free GCP/AWS tiers, github pages, Gitlab and others can go for a long run keeping your websites for free, at least for a few hundreds DAU.
Another trick is to get 1 2-4 Core VM and use docker to keep multiple projects there. If a project gets bigger or killed you just move/remove the container.
Their interface is very bad indeed.
Which is why I picked up on Terraform and never looked back
I get to version control my infrastructure and manage it all as code, I can also just run
terraform destroyand it all gets removed pretty quickly.Can't recommend using a code-as-infrastructure tool enough (Serverless is another good one I heard)
Tx! I know about terraform and I recommend it, but it is not good if you want to learn a specific platform.
After you learn it you can use terraform to make it easier, is a framework above cloudformation. I was learning for the certificate, I had to use their UI.
I also used Serverless, after a few manual deploys of my functions, is pretty neat.
There are (for GCP anyway, no experience with other serverless providers) pay-as-you-go models for certain components that scale down to 0. That allow you to keep a little-used project running for minimal expense.
E.g., on GCP: App Engine Standard + Datastore.
Yep, my emoji-compress.com is on an appengine like that.
Is not serverless, is just a container and you still have to think of provisioning when u make the config.
Serverless like functions or lambdas are also a good option for event-driven flows.
Absolutely, free tiers are great. I'm particularly impressed by Gitlab - private repo's and inbuilt CI tools = 👍
Thankfully I've mostly managed to squeeze into the free tiers for everything I've used for side projects on AWS so far. That said, I haven't exactly released any of my (many) side projects for public usage - so would need to keep an eye on the costs at that point...
Yeah, the AWS interface is crazy. I tried out a small project in it once with a free year of hosting. I took everything down, I thought. A month later they told me I owed money for the server that wasn't doing anything 😐
I have done the same thing on Azure. I also ran into an Azure bug that charged me a few grand and took months to clear up.
Personally, I recently launched pointer.nathanheffley.com to little fanfare. It's an extremely simple but reliable Pointing Poker platform. I pay a few bucks per month for hosting, but having a fun, small project to work on that I can use when the need arises makes it worth it.
Wow that's great, it's an amazing feeling when you really, truly help improve somebody's life like that.
Hi Mike, can i bother you to send me like one settings file for easyfarm? so i can have an example to work off of? Thank you for your time coding ^^
I host all of my projects on my raspberry pies. I've got 4. I just pay for the domain name.
I've thought about hosting some smaller test projects on a Raspberry Pi I have but I'm too concerned about messing up the security and letting someone gain unauthorized access to my network 😬
I just configured Fail2ban and iptables. I never had a security problem
Hosting the project is usually the only large cost to incur.
Not that I've hit it yet, but I feel that once a service has enough users to exceed a free tier hosting plan, it can usually pay for itself through donations/ads/subscription etc.
I run DevLids.com, but it's still small so shared hosting with unlimited traffic works fine. Although I wonder what would happen if it got heavy traffic at some point; if it would just become slow, or if the hoster would ask me to upgrade to another plan.
Other than that I paid for the Kirby-CMS-License and some stickers, so since it launched in June it cost me around 100€.
$6/month for a Digital Ocean droplet with automated backups, $12/year for a domain. I'm not losing sleep. That should stretch to fit a number of demos before I need to look at upgrading.