Came to say this. I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know. The downside is that AWS has all this expense for fancy stuff that can be done usually with a cheap instance, docker and nginx.
- Cloudflare for caching, DNS, domains.
- Hetzner, Linode or DO for a cheap instance
See what does/doesn't work. Storagebox on Hetzner is cheaper storage hosting and you can have redundant backups for cheap on backblaze as well or offshore cheap VPS doing encrypted backups with rclone/rsync.
> I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know
I don’t get why people assume others are just mindless fruit flies in these threads. Maybe OP just doesn’t want to fiddle with technology and pays Amazon to simply get it done. That’s what I’d do, there’s no need to turn every project into excercise in orchestrating open-source software.
AWS is wayyy too complicated to "simply get it done" for a single user. It makes no sense to learn all that if you just do it for yourself.
In fact I have to do a bit of AWS for work and I hate it with a passion. It's spread over a ton of services each with their own console (that look & feel like they were designed by completely different people), lots of overlap between services, complex billing. Configuration often needs to be done with complex json files. Ugh. Perhaps it makes sense for a major enterprise where you have orchestration for everything. But I would never pick this total mess for a personal project.
Azure has a bad name but at least everything is integrated in the same console pretty nicely.
But really if you just need an instance of something for personal use, DigitalOcean, Scaleway etc are so much simpler. And cheaper, and most stuff is just included in the monthly price so you don't get billing surprises.
aws is the ibm of cloud. As a CTO, I'm beholden both to my cofounders and our investors. I'd rather spend my energy defending or pushing novel engineering practices or directions for our tech stack rather than going to DO or hetzner. also AWS is huge and their reliability is damn good. Plus its relatively easy to get in contact with a real support engineer when shit its the fan. When you have a lot of customers depending on your software to "just work." That premium is worthwhile.
- Cloudflare for caching, DNS, domains. - Hetzner, Linode or DO for a cheap instance
See what does/doesn't work. Storagebox on Hetzner is cheaper storage hosting and you can have redundant backups for cheap on backblaze as well or offshore cheap VPS doing encrypted backups with rclone/rsync.