Ask HN: Best place to host a prototype?

[levicampbell]

I'm working on a startup tht allows people to search for music by title, artist, lyrics, rhythm and more, and I think I'll have a working prototype in a few days, my main problem is where to host it so that investors, the RIAA, and others can see it?

[aeden]

What's it written in? If it's in Ruby then Heroku would be my first choice because it's so easy to deploy an app to (with no system setup).

Another option would be to run it on EC2 using a pre-built distro image with the components you need (if you can find such an image). This will be more expensive than Heroku but you can define the stack.

I'm sure others can chime in with their suggestions depending on what you developed it in.

[HerraBRE]

Any vserver will do, I use Linode for my production stuff, they are excellent.

If you don't want to spend time on server configuration and deployments yet, you could also use http://pagekite.net/ to just directly expose the HTTP server running on your work machine.

(disclaimer: I am the author of PageKite, actively seeking new users. :-)

[aeden]

PageKite is interesting - how do you mitigate the risk of security vulnerabilities that could exist by running on a potentially unpatched machine that you use for everything else (i.e. your typical PC)?

[HerraBRE]

Your personal IP address is not exposed, so you "only" have to worry about the security of the HTTP server itself.

How good or bad that is depends on what you are doing. For someone demoing static files (e.g. a web designer), running a mature HTTP server like Apache in static-only mode is almost entirely without risk.

I am also planning to add some access controls to PageKite itself, so only authenticated users' traffic is passed through to the HTTP server, but that's just vapour at the moment. :-)

[HerraBRE]

Oh, and one other way to control risk, which we tend to forget in a world of always-on cloud services: you can turn it off when you aren't using it.

It's blunt, but it really works. Software that isn't running can't be attacked.

[levicampbell]

PageKite looks like it might work, thanks.

[eklovlfjkeos]

Hosts that I've been very happy with: Rackspace Cloud, WebFaction, and Linode. If you don't expect too much load or traffic at this point, the easiest/cheapest solution would be to go for WebFaction (or Rackspace Cloud if you need a VPS. They have a slightly cheaper entry point pricewise than Linode).

[triviatise]

We use a combo of github/heroku. What has been especially nice is how easy it is to transition between people working on the project. As people come and go I can give/takeaway access and they can easily download the code, make some changes then push to staging or production.