When I recently started building ChannelAdam and this Software Development Zone, I considered many different types of website technologies including various blog engines, content management systems and programming languages.
However, I couldn’t decide which technology I should use until I had a better idea of how I would host the sites. As a polyglot programmer, the language and technology was the least of my concerns. I had 4 overarching principles that would guide the hosting and development of this site.
My Principles / Technology Selection Criteria
The principles I wanted to follow, and thus the selection criteria for hosting were:
- Low cost. Since this is a hobby, I want to keep the cost of hosting this operation very low or even better, free.
- Branding. I must have a custom domain.
- Trustworthiness and security. I must have SSL. I consider it to be my duty to you, in good conscience. When you visit my website, I want you to be assured that the content you see was not tampered with between my server and your browser (i.e. no Man-in-the-Middle attacks - especially with so many public, unsecured Wi-Fi access points these days. For this reason, I agree with the SSL/HTTPS Everywhere movement, and I think that all websites should be HTTPS, even if they don’t specifically have any sensitive content. Let’s keep the web safer!
- Search Engine Optimisation. I must have SEO and page redirection capability for changing the structure of the site in the future.
- Stability, scalability and availability. The host must be stable and have high availability.
Tell Me the Results Already!
After researching the various hosts and platform providers, I was a little disappointed. Hosting a website, with a custom domain and SSL is not commonly done cheaply.
Having said that, RedHat OpenShift won outright - they are the ONLY host offering free hosting, with a custom domain and SSL, and scaling up to 3 ‘gears’ for free. In order to get the SSL however, you apparently need to register and upgrade to the zero dollar Bronze plan and enter your credit card details. The only problem is that they do not yet accept billing addresses for people in Australia - so sadly I cannot yet use OpenShift.
The next best host I found, after some positive word of mouth, was Digital Ocean. $5 a month for a Linux box under my complete control, with a custom domain and SSL.
At the moment, Digital Ocean has my business…
The Long Version of the Results
The Plan to Reduce Costs
I quickly determined that the easiest way to reduce costs is to have a static website only. This reduces cost because the size of the server can remain small and still perform under high load.
In addition, it is possible to use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to serve your static files. The problem with CDNs however, is that the free ones I found do not support SSL.
After researching the current state of Static Site Generators (SSGs), I was sufficiently convinced that I could develop the majority of Channel Adam as a static website with the help of a SSG.
The cost of SSL certificates was mitigated with StartSSL - where anyone can get a free SSL certificate (for their non-commercial website).
The Comparison
Below are some of the hosts that I researched. Not every cell in the table is filled out, either because the host does not offer the service or I quickly lost interest in them due to other criteria not being met…
| Host | Free Tier | Expansion | Technologies | Custom Domain Support | SSL Support | Redirects |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heroku | 1x Dyno (512 mb RAM, 1x CPU Share) Dev/Hobby Postgres Database with up to 10k rows (and up to 4 hours downtime per month) Standard support 1+ Day response times |
2x Dynos (512 mb RAM, 1x CPU Share) $0.05c/dyno-hour ($34.50/month) Basic 10M rows $9/month Premium Support 24/7, 1-hour response SLA, $1000/month |
Node.js, Java, Ruby, Python See Heroko Addons |
Free See Custom Domains |
$20/month for a SSL Endpoint Available in US and Europe regions See: SSL Endpoint SSL |
|
| dotCloud | None | Static site, 1 instance, 32mb RAM $0.06/hour ($4.32/month) Postgres $8.64/month |
PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Perl, … | Yes, unlimited | SSL Load Balancer $21.60/month See: SSL |
|
| AppFog | None | Basic $20/month Unlimited apps within 2GB RAM. Up to 8 service instances. 200mb storage per MySQL or Postgres instance 10GB total data transfer 40 requests per second per app instance |
Java, Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP | Unlimited | 2 dedicated SSL endpoints (on AWS) for the Developer $50/month plan or better. | |
| Amazon S3 | 1 year only Free Usage Tier. 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20000 Get Requests, 2000 Put Requests, and 15GB of data transfer out each month. |
First 1 TB / month $0.0330/GB, plus data transfer fees. | Files See: Website Hosting Gotcha using virtual host How to server S3 over https with CloudFront |
Yes - Amazon S3 with Amazon Route 53 DNS Custom domain walkthrough Custom SSL domain names |
Yes - with Amazon CloudFront Custom SSL SNI Custom SSL - no upfront or monthly fees for certificate management; simply pay normal Amazon CloudFront rates for data transfer and HTTPS requests. e.g. $0.0125 per 10K HTTPS requests plus data transfer of $0.190 for the first 10TB per month. Dedicated-IP - $600 for each custom SSL certificate you associate with your CloudFront distributions, pro-rated by the hour. How to serve S3 over https with CloudFront |
|
| Gondor | None | Shared Hosting. A slot is 1 Python WSGI process or 2.5 GB PostgreSQL database or 64 MB Redis cache or 1 Celery process $10/month |
Python | Yes | Yes. Dedicated-IP SSL | |
| OpenShift | 1-3 Gears Custom domain Shared SSL certificate for rhcloud.com SNI SSL for custom domain 512mb RAM 1GB storage per gear As an example, this is suitable for a Drupal-based app with: 15 pages/second Hundreds of articles ~50k visitors per month |
Small gears $0.02/hour Medium gear $0.05/hour (recommended for Java) |
PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Java | Yes for $0/month | Yes for $0/month | Yes, depending on the technology used. |
| Google App Engine | 28 instance hours 5GB cloud storage 1GB/app per day incoming data 1GB/app per day outgoing data See: Quotas Static resources are placed in the cache and are therefore not part of instance hours |
$0.05 / instance / hour Cloud storage $0.026 / GB / month Incoming data free Outgoing data $0.12 / GB See: App Engine |
Python, Java, PHP, Go See: Static files in Python Host on Google Server Implementing a static website in Google App Engine Git push to deploy |
Yes. Domain |
SNI SSL certificate slots are offered for no additional charge for accounts that have billing activated. See: Pricing SSL Virtual IP - $39/month |
NOT FOR STATIC CONTENT |
| Google Compute Engine | 1 core, 3.75 GB RAM, $0.07/hour | Node.js | ||||
| Microsoft Azure Websites | Up to 10 free websites, 1GB storage, *.azurewebsites.net subdomain and SSL | Shared preview price: $0.013/hour (~$10/month) Basic Plan: Small instance, 1 CPU core, 1.75MB RAM, $0.075/hour, (~$56/month) Standard Plan: Small instance, $0.10/hour, (~75/month) |
.NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Java | Not on Free plan. On Shared plan and above. | Not on Free or Shared plans. On Basic plan: SNI SSL $9/month, IP SSL $39/month On Standard plan: 5 SNI SSL and 1 IP SSL included. |
|
| Microsoft Azure CDN Storage block blob with a CDN endpoint and custom domain |
Locally redundant storage: $0.069 per GB for the first TB Geo Redundant, Read Only Geo Redundant $0.005 per 100,000 transactions across all Storage types See: Pricing |
See: How to use CDN How to enable CDN How to map CDN content to a custom domain Configure custom domain name in Azure Storage |
Yes | Yes, but NOT on custom domain. See: SSL cert for custom domain endpoint on CDN |
||
| GitHub Pages | 1GB per repository, 100mb per file | Html, Markdown, Jekyll See: Using Jekyll |
Yes See: My custom domain isn’t working |
No | ||
| BitBucket Static website hosting |
||||||
| Digital Ocean | None | 512mb RAM, 1 Core processor, 20GB SSD Disk, 1TB Transfer, $0.015/hour ($5 / month) | ||||
| Websites hosted on Google Drive | ||||||
| Modulus.io | $0.02/hour, 296MB RAM + 512MB Swap |
Conclusion
It is possible to run a website cheaply, with a custom domain and a free SSL certificate - you just have to do the research in order to find the best deal.
For me, RedHat OpenShift and Digital Ocean are leaders in their field.
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