[unshavedyak]

I'm looking to deploy a $5/m DigitalOcean server (single binary) to run a simple HTTP[s] server, with persistent sqlite/fs and backed up via braindead rsync to my local system.

Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a continual set of asterisks.. but i'm probably being unfair and PTSD'y.

Think i should give Fly a look? I at least find their SQLite features super interesting

[mrkurt]

A 1GB Fly machine is ~$5.70/mo (we charge by the second, some months are better than others).

Persistent volumes are $0.15/gb each.

Not too far off, depending on how much data you have. However the platform has different tradeoffs than a single DigitalOcean VM. You'll get better uptime percentages on a single DO VM than you will on a single VM Fly app. You may not notice, but it's statistically true.

[unshavedyak]

Does Fly handle price caps? Ie to setup pricing to replicate ~$5/m behavior. Helping to ensure i can't use up all my ~$5/m budget in a few days of traffic, but i also can't go over some specified cap.

If so i'll probably give it a try!

edit: Regardless, going to give it a try. I was totally set on just using DO because i wanted something dumb and simple. This sounds like it might offer me that, plus not having to manage the OS. I really, really like that if i can keep pricing similar.

Bandwidth costs might become a concern, but i can always migrate to DO/etc if needed. Hopefully not, hah.

edit2: Looks like Fly has pre-paid billing[1], though i'm unclear if i can replicate the functionality i'm asking about. In this case i'd need a prepaid limit and a subscription to fill pre-paid with $N once a month.

Prepaid by itself is at least something, if nothing else exists. Just super annoying if you forget to add money.

[1]: https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon...

[halter73]

They claimed they did support price caps the HN launch thread referenced in this new press release. They got a lot of praise for it in the comments back then.

> Max monthly spend: unexpected traffic spikes happen, and the thought of spending an unbounded amount of money in a month is really uncomfortable. You can configure fly.io apps with a max monthly budget, we'll suspend them when they hit that budget, and then re-enable them at the beginning of the next month.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857

[tennis_80]

I’m not the person you’re replying to but I’d say so.

Under $5/month you pay nothing at the moment.

https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/

You need to look at the following for pricing:

- Compute

- Volumes (attached SSD, one per compute instance) - $0.15/GB/month.

- Bandwidth - if you go over 160GB you have to pay per GB.

Gut feel, ~$5/month should be fine for a small project as long as you’re not storing loads of data or doing something that requires lots of bandwidth.

If your project is used irregularly and HTTP based, you can also scale compute down to 0 machines. It’ll boot up again when you get a HTTP request. In my experience it took ~3s or so to boot up a NestJS app on a small VM, totally acceptable for a dev environment.

[unshavedyak]

Any idea if there are price caps? That's one thing i like about "dumb simple" machines is i'm paying for the machine, if it gets traffic and dies i still only pay $5/m. I'm not trying to build facebook, it's okay if it dies.

[doublepg23]

I ran fly for a six months and it went from free to $10/mo and I still don’t know why.

I’d say if static pricing is important to you stick with DO.

[unshavedyak]

Some variation is okay, but boy do i need pricing caps. I might give it a try just for security (not managing the OS), but if there's no caps.. oof.

[doublepg23]

I’m unaware if there’s caps, the pricing just seemed opaque to me due to poor monitoring tools.

Security wise, Ubuntu LTS with unattended upgrades and livepatch is likely better than 99% of public facing servers.

[unshavedyak]

Huh, i'll have to look into that. I'm not aware of unattended upgrades. Though i still value not risking a messed up config leaking data by way of ssh access, or something.

[doublepg23]

If you install a current version of Ubuntu it uses perfectly sane defaults for SSH. If you go the step further and disable password authentication entirely and only use keys you’ll be very secure.

I fully understand the preference of a serverless platform of course, especially if you’re more of a programmer and less sysadmin.