Source
r/webhosting•
mxzf

What's a good way to host a low-traffic website?

I'm currently working on developing a website to replace an existing website that was created in WordPress and is, I believe, hosted on GoDaddy.

The new website is written in Django instead, and I'm planning to use Apache to host it and likely run a small PostgreSQL database for the Django database. I'm familiar with Django development and Linux IT/hosting through work, but I haven't had to worry about actually getting servers myself in that regard.

I'm completely comfortable taking a bare Linux machine and configuring it as-needed, I'm just new to trying to figure out the hosting side of things. I'm tempted to spin it up on a spare Linux box in my house, but I'd prefer a bit more uptime than consumer ISPs tend to offer.

The site won't have much traffic, I'd be surprised if it gets a couple dozen visitors in a week, but it will be serving MP3 audio files that are 30-60 minutes long (which means it also needs at least a bit of disk space available for hosting them).

My first thought was to host it on AWS, but the list of their offerings is a little overwhelming; I have no clue what I actually need from the list of thousands of different slightly-different options. I'm not completely settled on using AWS or anything like that, they just have the name recognition.

Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to go about hosting this site?

Posted Oct 31, 2019, 4:34 AM UTC

719
yadius•

Look at AWS LightSail. The cheapest option is $3.50/month and gets you 20GB SSD storage with up to 512GB transfers.

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mxzfOP•

Yeah, LightSail is one of the things I was looking at. It looks like it might be a good fit for what I need, but I was a bit confused looking back and forth between that and all the EC2 and other servers they offer.

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yadius•

Yes, I've been using AWS for a few years and wasn't even aware of LightSail until I started looking at doing some of their qualification exams. I now regret not spending time doing that at the start. It would have saved me a lot of money.

Their core services are cloud storage (S3) and processing (EC2). Services like Elastic Beanstalk and LightSail are just packaged versions of those core services to fit the needs of specific classes of customers.

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autumn-morning-2085•

How about trying it on Heroku? The free account should be enough but there is a bit of a wake up time for the first visitor (the server goes to sleep after 30 mins of no activity). Their free postgres has 10K row limit I think.

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fp4•

Heroku is my suggestion as well.

Backblaze B2 (first 10 GB is free -- then $0.005/GB after) with Cloudflare (free plan -- to eliminate B2 bandwidth charges) would work well for hosting the actual MP3 files.

Could host the entire thing without spending a dime.

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Node_edm•

A digital ocean droplet is $5 a month. You work with a bare Linux machine.

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danny_reagan•

Do you have any budget restrictions ?

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[deleted]•

[removed]

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mxzfOP•

Nothing hard. I'd rather not pay more needed, so it seems like $5-10 would be the upper limit of what I'd expect since there seem to be many services out there at a similar price point and the server really doesn't need much power, but paying a slight premium for a good product isn't out of the question.

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asphaltplayer•

You could try out nosupportlinuxhosting. 1$/month, barebones Cpanel Linux servers.

(http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/)

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mxzfOP•

I don't think that's exactly what I'm looking for. Looking at the FAQ, they say that they don't support Python at all (which is what Django runs on) and it also seems to be completely focused on hosting a PHP site like WordPress. It looks more like this service is set up as vhosts instead of virtualized servers.

I'm trying to get away from that type of model and move towards a server where I can configure Apache and use Python how I'd like to.

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d3vrandom•

then you need an unmanaged vps. vultr, ramnode, digital ocean, hetzner cloud are good options. these are in fact the best of the budget unmanaged providers. you get root access to a virtual server of your own. you can ssh in and set it up as you like.

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andrew77768•

Maybe an OVH VPS could be what you're looking for? 🤔

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mxzfOP•

I'd looked into them a bit. They don't seem bad, but I worry about the hard drive space. I'm not sure exactly how much space I need for hosting MP3s, but 20GB feels a bit on the small side; and their prices for increasing storage size seem to go up pretty steeply.

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sciencerulze•

Vultr starts at $2.50/month for a VPS.

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trizzo•

I think the biggest hurdle would be storage. You can look at using Amazon s3 or Digital Oceans Buckets to store and serve. They both include a CDN so once you push the file, it's available on their CDN.

Google Cloud Platform has a free tier that includes compute and storage. Ultimately if you need more storage than the free, pay for it. The compute isn't going to be close to lightsail, Digital Ocean or other vm providers, it's 1cpu and 486MB of memory with 30G storage.

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edhirppu•

Ramnode is offering 'Massive KVM VPS' with 160 GB HDD and 512 MB RAM for $3/mo.

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AC_Fan•

Hetzner CX11 + Block Storage (SSD)/Storage Box (HDD). Starting from 2.5 euro.

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mattmill98•

buyvm.net.

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