Excellent Selection of PaaS Choices

October 27, 2012 / Mad Coding, AppFog, Heroku, Google App Engine, GAE, CloudBees, Azure

DreamHost has been my web host for the longest time, but it’s time to change. Nowadays we have many PaaS choices or IaaS, so that in my situation DreamHost doesn’t make sense anymore. Next year I plan to move my monthly spending on DreamHost to some of the choices mentioned below.

PaaS also allows me to quickly get a service running for my startup without dealing with installations.

Note that the pros & cons listed are from the perspective of my usage level. YMMV.

Hosting Static Content

I was using wordpress which requires PHP and MySQL, but my blog is not dynamic in nature so things like Jekyll and Hakyll really made sense for me. There are many ways you can host static content for free or at a low cost.

Currently my blog is hosted with GitHub Pages which is free. There’s also NearlyFreeSpeech.net that costs very little. Also, many of the PaaS providers are great for static blogs too. I got my blog on AppFog very easily and I’ve read about people using Heroku as well. More on those PaaS providers later.

DreamHost Pros and Cons

Using DreamHost still makes sense in some situations. I’m using Amazon Route 53 for my DNS and that costs $0.51/month for 1 domain. With DreamHost you can have unlimited domains without paying extra. Below are the pros and cons for my usage.

Pros:

Cons:

I’m using 13GB of my “unlimited” storage mainly due to my old online photo album. DreamHost also gives you 50GB backup storage space. You can use duplicity for encrypted offsite backup with it, so that’s pretty sweet. You also get cron, filesystem access, and mysql. PaaS providers sometimes don’t give you all of that.

If your app is storage heavy, DreamHost is still the better choice. Where it falls short for me is that for $8 a month I cannot use the latest and greatest software. To use Ruby and Sinatra I had to mess around only to have an old version working. Similar situation for Rails and Python I believe. If I want to run Node.js or Clojure I also have to tinker with it somehow.

Since I already moved my photo storage to SkyDrive (25GB) and all of my projects elsewhere, it’s time to say goodbye to DreamHost.

Windows Azure

I only played with Azure briefly. I was still at Microsoft when Azure Sandbox was introduced internally on the The Garage email list. Before then there’s no way to run your app for free forever. It seems that it’s still that way with the 90-day trial.

Azure Sandbox is a great idea, and I used it for my daily Bing wallpaper app. However, I quickly found out that with the quota they gave me I can’t even keep the service running 24/7. I’m not going to pay for a hobby project, so I ended up going with Google App Engine.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is pretty good. Its free quota per app per day is great for personal projects.

Pros:

Cons:

Source code for my daily Bing wallpaper service is on github. It makes use of GAE cron to fetch new wallpapers daily. I’m only using 2% of the 1GB storage and 2% of the allocated daily instance hours, so I can keep this running forever for free.

My imagedatastore project, written in Go, is also hosted on GAE. I’m using it to host any images I need to display on my blog. It uses Blobstore and Datastore so I’m not going to run out of storage at all.

If you’re interested, GAE Storage is something I wrote that allows a dead simple place to throw data to. I have a modified ZeroBin version that stores data in GAE using this project instead of needing filesystem access.

App Engine allows me to host 3 of my projects for the price of free.

Heroku

Heroku is another PaaS provider where I have projects hosted. All of my projects only need 1 web dyno, so all these projects can be hosted for free.

Pros:

Cons:

In order to have RSS feed containing actual article content, I have a project that parses a twitter feed and then go fetch the linked websites’ content. Written in Python and uses Readability module to parse data. Source code on github. The one downside of Heroku is that I don’t have a cron to periodically update the feed. I use GAE to trigger updates instead. I got a custom domain set up for this before Heroku started charging for custom domains.

I also have a Clojure project hosted on here, and the prototype Node.js service for the startup goes here as well. Both very easy to update with a simple git push. I like that I can run heroku run bash and run helper scripts for these prototypes.

Again, 3 projects for the price of free. Plus I get to use Clojure and Node.js. Can’t beat that. I think getting Haskell going is a bit more involved though, somebody please make it easier for Haskell.

AppFog

Heroku charging for custom domain drove me to check out AppFog that I signed up a while ago and never used. After playing with it I really like it! I moved my EOL pinterest interface to AppFog now.

Pros:

Cons:

The one lingering project that I still had on DreamHost was the EOL project. The eol.org server is unfortunately not very fast. Also, in order to not put much load on their server, I cache all the results I get from them for 24 hours to avoid re-fetch. I’m using disk caching so I wouldn’t be able to move to GAE or Heroku without rewriting the caching part. But AppFog to the rescue! You get actual filesystem access so I got EOL project up and running in no time!

Another quick project I used AppFog for is my blog. GitHub was down recently and brought down my blog as well. I quickly put up a Node.js server on AppFog to serve my blog content. It’s dead easy with node-static. See source code on github.

I love AppFog for all these things I was able to do. One downside for me so far is that every time I update my app I have to upload the whole thing again. Also, for some reason the command line tool to view logs didn’t work reliably for me.

So that’s 1 project on AppFog plus my backup blog for the price of free. Awesome!

CloudBees

Pros:

Cons:

I found CloudBees while searching for hosted build service. I put up the clj-philosopher code on there and used Jenkins to automate running the tests. CloudBees is unique in this aspect of providing a Jenkins service. I have not used their Java offering.

The New World

When I first played with Node.js I used my EC2 free tier and that was pretty easy. However, with all these PaaS choices it’s even easier to get things up and running.

The best choices I found for storing stuff is GAE and AppFog. I haven’t played with CouchDB on cloudant or other NoSQL providers with free tier like cassandra.io and mongohq yet, so that’s hopefully to come. Anything free for Riak or Redis?

Using a combination of different PaaS providers, I now have all of my web facing projects hosted at places for free. At this time the only cost I have is from Route 53 at $0.51/month. Once the period I already paid at DreamHost ends I’ll be looking to spend the money elsewhere. Maybe for paying to get more features at some of the providers.