[ibudiallo]

This is a nice write up. My only concern is that these days we think that the alternative to free is $40 to hundreds of dollars a months for something decent.

In the days of shared hosting, you could drop $3 to $5 to host your small website and expect your website to decently perform. But with your DO/Linode, you can expect excellent performance for the same price.

Only last month my two $5 droplets handled 5 million web requests from a viral post.

[cutler]

For 5 Euros per month a cloud VPS at Hetzner.com. comes with 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM. That's 8 or maybe 16 times the RAM that Facebook probably launched with plus extra CPU and SSD disk speed. All these cobbled-together free tiers may be slightly cheaper but the added complexity I can do without. It just seems like tech for tech's sake.

[azeirah]

You'd have to be doing something really computationally expensive or be running a very large operation to really need something expensive.

Simple budget web hosting packages can easily handle tens of thousands of requests per hour for like $4/month..

You're absolutely right.

[SpecialistEMT]

Im running a $5(+$2 for backups) 1GB linode and getting around 50k views a month on a properly configured wordpress with caching and 30 plugins with nginx on Centos 7. Sometimes 25-50 ppl at the same time. Site is pretty fast(faster than most- maybe because lack of a dozen of trackers). With 2GB ram and 1 more core it would be super fast. Im using Centmin mod stackscript for managing nginx.