| Rent a VPS. Then rent a dedicated server when you outgrow it. Whatever you design will be platform agnostic. You’ll be able to decide for yourself when you get big enough what’s the right path for hosting. You won’t be locked in to any particular platform. Install something like dokku. Use Docker containers. My startup scaled to $2M ARR on a single dedicated server for our core infrastructure. (Yes, that’s a bit extreme) Now we have over 30 dedicated servers servicing our core infra, many of which live in a colo rack in Dallas. Everyone is all about ‘the cloud’ - however IMHO it’s overly complicated and a distraction to start, and overly expensive as you scale. (AWS would be 16x more expensive for us than our colo setup) Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode... are all fine for getting started. Many even have programs where startups can get free credits: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ When you grow checkout some Dedicated Hosting providers like Hivelocity, or checkout webhostingtalk’a dedicated offers forum. Put cloudflare infront of your service for some protection and lots of options/flexibility.
Backup offsite. S3 is fine to start. Can get expensive. Look to back blaze B2, or c14 from scaleway. Source: 20 years of hosting, many startups. |