Hosting BIG or small

[f.laengle]

One of the first questions when starting a new online tool, website, blog, forum, ... is:

Where do I host my website?

There are the three big hosting providers: Amazon, Google & Microsoft
And then there are countless smaller providers depending where you are.

With the big providers you usually pay a lot less in the beginning because the bill is based on processing power from the server. Ever heard about the 20K-Dollar-Bills start-ups got from those companies because they had a loop somewhere in their code that ate up a lot of processing power?
The nice thing is, that a lot of systems are easily available to you like SMS-Verification. It is also really easy to scale the servers when your website grows because it is all done by the big provider.

Now for the small providers. Usually you buy a hosting and then usw something like Wordpress for the website. You might need some plugins for different stuff, which also costs some money. In the beginning stages this adds up quite a lot. The scalability is doable as long as the website can stay on one server. As far as I know when you reach about 100K users a day it will bi difficult to maintain the whole thing on one server.

Now the big question is which is the better choice if I start up a new website?
It is quite challenging to change the system later on because it means building up the whole website/application from the ground up again because the hosts don't work the same way.

How would you do this?
- Starting with a smaller provider, which costs a bit more money but is local and you are not that reliant on one specific provider.
- Starting with a big provider like Google, MS or Amazon which is a lot cheaper, easier to scale but you are dependant on this provider.

Easy question - quite hard to answer

for me at least.

 

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[kubikdanon]

One of the first questions when starting a new online tool, website, blog, forum, ... is:

Where do I host my website?

There are the three big hosting providers: Amazon, Google & Microsoft
And then there are countless smaller providers depending where you are.

With the big providers you usually pay a lot less in the beginning because the bill is based on processing power from the server. Ever heard about the 20K-Dollar-Bills start-ups got from those companies because they had a loop somewhere in their code that ate up a lot of processing power?
The nice thing is, that a lot of systems are easily available to you like SMS-Verification. It is also really easy to scale the servers when your website grows because it is all done by the big provider.

Now for the small providers. Usually you buy a hosting and then usw something like Wordpress for the website. You might need some plugins for different stuff, which also costs some money. In the beginning stages this adds up quite a lot. The scalability is doable as long as the website can stay on one server. As far as I know when you reach about 100K users a day it will bi difficult to maintain the whole thing on one server.

Now the big question is which is the better choice if I start up a new website?
It is quite challenging to change the system later on because it means building up the whole website/application from the ground up again because the hosts don't work the same way.

How would you do this?
- Starting with a smaller provider, which costs a bit more money but is local and you are not that reliant on one specific provider.
- Starting with a big provider like Google, MS or Amazon which is a lot cheaper, easier to scale but you are dependant on this provider.

Easy question - quite hard to answer

for me at least.

Smaller providers (e.g. Digital Ocean, Hetzner) are going to be much cheaper than the big three. So I would definitely recommend going with them
Depending on the programming language you're using to build your website, Cloudflare (Cloudflare Pages, to be specific) could be had for pretty much $0 (I personally have a small website on their free plan, my website is written with Sveltekit(js))