A few weeks back I posted “So What’s the Business?” and briefly discussed hosting my site in the cloud as opposed to trying to build my own infrastructure, and I touched on the serverless option as well, but I didn’t go into depth at all. Now I’d like to do that a bit regarding hosting.
There are thousands of options for hosting a site in the cloud. Just do a web search on “web hosting” and there are thousands in the United States alone. There are the big companies, smaller ones, and probably even Trump’s 400-pound guy has a server available to host your site.
But seriously, there are a lot of options to choose from. I am going to be hosting my business on one of these options, so it is vital that it has these qualities:
- Dependable
- Reliable
- Can handle large fluctuations in traffic
- Excellent support available
- Great documentation available
- Good community of users
- A good track record
- Mature in its offerings
- Ease of use
- Affordable
- Familiar
- Has serverless capabilities
I’m sure there are more but this is what comes to mind right now. If I am going to have my business completely dependent upon another business to make sure it is always available and operating properly it had better be damn good.
This list, especially the last one regarding serverless, leads me to the big company options: AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. Having gone to the ServerlessConf I learned a lot about what is available. AWS is the most mature, though the others are catching up. I got to work with AWS during my workshops at the conferences, I have worked with AWS at work and I have been studying it via LinuxAcademy for which my current job is providing an account for training. I feel comfortable with AWS and am impressed with it. Also it meets all of my criteria.
If you are interested to learn more, this is a good chart of the three with links to their various offerings (I got the table here).
Free Tiers
All three of them have free options that allow you to do development and test without paying anything or at least very little. Here’s an article that compares the three free tiers.
I however am interested in AWS specifically and this is their free tier. Some last for just 12 months and some are always free.
Where I Am Now
So far I have been using AWS mostly through my own study. I am currently working through this book and will share what I learn in future posts. As I go through the book I am going to design my site so that once I get through the book I can start implementing it. I hope to have a basic version of the site complete by the end of August.