[adamrezich]

this is a great opportunity to ask something I've been wondering about for awhile:

what are the best options out there for hosting websites built as HTTP-serving executables (either Windows or Linux)? is it possible to do this relatively cheaply?

I ask because I've been working on a framework[0] for building websites in a compiled language recently, and while it's been a ton of fun to build and test locally as a hobby project, I have absolutely no idea if it's even remotely financially viable to host a (small- to medium-sized) website made this way, compared to all of the managed hosting solutions out there for PHP/Node/etc.

I don't want/need to pay for a whole dedicated server—I just want to serve HTTP (eventually HTTPS) from a single executable, using one or more SQLite database files. ideally, it would cost as close to your typical shared PHP host as possible.

I have almost zero experience with "cloud" hosting—I made a small game with Node on Azure years ago, and accidentally racked up charges just playing around with it in development—so I don't know if this, or AWS, or whatever else is a viable solution for this. I've seen that it is indeed possible to host a single executable on Azure, but I haven't actually tried it myself, or determined what the pricing for this would end up being.

[0] https://github.com/rezich/Newf

[gwking]

I am currently working on a low traffic (back office) web app for a client. It runs off of a single AWS EC2 instance (2 vcpu arm). When I looked at the hourly pricing I thought it would be $30/month, but the actual bill has been more like $4/month, I suppose due to an idling discount or perhaps some free tier credit or something else.

The web app is fronted cloudflare (free tier). On the box itself I have caddy set up as a reverse proxy with the cloudflare cert, then uvicorn serving my python asgi (starlette) app. The app uses a local SQLite db.

I’m still working out some of the operational stuff like backups and monitoring but so far I am very pleased with the setup. I’m learning a lot and for the first time I do not feel like there is some monstrous pile of complexity behind a curtain.

Setup takes some time but I have detailed notes and it gets easier every time I run through. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to hear more details.

[schemescape]

Maybe look at container hosting with your (statically linked) binary being the only thing in the container?

Otherwise, why not just get a cheap VPS and host the binary there? I’ve used Vultr and it’s $3.50/month all-in, at the low end. There are even cheaper providers, although I don’t know about their quality. I bet this option would be the cheapest.

This is the beauty of a single binary—it’s trivial to deploy!

[adamrezich]

that was my thought exactly! I wonder if we're ever going to see a shift toward single-compiled-binary websites, away from increasingly complex deployments that exist solely to facilitate interpreted language stacks.

this is the question driving the framework I'm building—it even has support for simple HTML templates, but they're interpreted, type-checked against the structs that get passed into them, and baked into the executable, all at compile time. this is all coming off of building a website for a client using PHP for the first time in over a decade—on one hand, I appreciate the relative simplicity and ease of deployment compared to modern backend stacks, but on the other hand, it's still an interpreted language, with all the baggage associated with that. I believe it is possible to take the ease of use and speed of iteration of interpreted languages, and the benefits of strongly-typed compiled languages, and get the best of both worlds—at least, for the scale and complexity of website that I want to build and maintain.

[torstenvl]

Not exactly what you're looking for, but I'd use lighttpd and a CGI program.

[robdelacruz]

This site has a good tutorial for this. It recommends vultr (which is what I use), for $2.50 - $5 a month.

https://landchad.net/

[adamrezich]

what a fantastic resource—thank you!

[lelanthran]

Cheap VPS. I run multiple things on a single cheap digital ocean droplet.

Multiple websites served by golang written server, some static sites, also gitea and Jenkins.

[easytiger]

You need a VPS. Hundreds of providers available.

[zokier]

For AWS simplest thing is to throw it into docker container (`FROM scratch` can work) and run in Fargate (AWS' container runtime). But its not super-cheap solution; baseline cost is something like $20/mo for Fargate and additional $20/mo for load-balancer. Lambda can work too, but it is in some ways bit more involved.

Cheapest AWS solution would be just EC2 instances (=basic virtual machines). t3a.nano instances cost just $3.5/mo and do not require additional load-balancers.

The modern cloudy approach would be to look into stuff like CloudFlare Workers, iirc they can run WASM, so if you manage to compile your code to that then it might work.