[sf-lug] Questions about Cloud Services

[Zach Hanna]

What are your goals?
What do you want out of the site, and what do you plan on hosting (Frontend and backend stack)?
What is your budget for the hosting costs of this store (compared to Shopify)?
I have plenty of opinions on this but think most of the “cloud” providers are drastically overpriced for what you get, if you are only running Linux on a single vertically scaled vm with enough resources for everything to run the store.

In my day job I primarily support/design/built Linux servers and Kubernetes clusters on Google cloud, and help customers design things for scale and resiliency, usually via separating out different components to run in different containers and never in only one place. 
So if you are interested in going the “reliable, scalable, proper container best practices” route I can help give advice on that and I think Google Cloud, IBM cloud, or Azure are good places to build and deploy a properly architected eCommerce business backend. But only if you have a certain budget floor (usually at least a few hundred a month).

Another approach is to go the “serverless” route with something like Google App Engine but that is a bit more of a learning curve on the dev side, with the advantage of only ever paying for exactly what you use (the original promise of Cloud) and being almost completely hands off for day to day operations.

But if you want to just do everything on a Linux VM, and keep doing things the way you’re used to as a Linux admin/enthusiast…stay away from the “cloud” providers, and go with a budget dedicated host like Ionos. 
They will give you a root server starting at like $35 a month that’s dedicated and you can install whatever you want, though I personally enjoy using Plesk to automate a lot of the provisioning tasks, you may wish to hand roll all your configs. 
You really can’t beat the dedicated server pricing for the performance, in any of the “cloud” vendors, or even at home really considering the power costs and the static IP charges.

A third option is “shared hosting” but it’s not much cheaper and you have no shell access. 



> 
> On Feb 3, 2023, at 9:06 AM, Jonathan Drews <jondrews at fastmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I came across this Gem:
> How To Set Up A Botnet On Digital Ocean
> 
> https://kili.io/2022/09/18/how-to-set-up-a-botnet-on-digital-ocean-2/
> 
> EXCERPT:
> "Setting up a botnet on DigitalOcean is a simple process that can be completed in just a few minutes. This guide will show you how to set up a botnet on DigitalOcean, and provide some tips on how to make it more effective. A botnet is a network of computers controlled by a single entity."
> 
>> On Fri, Feb 3, 2023, at 07:09, Jonathan Drews wrote:
>> Hi Folks:
>> 
>> I have a little company that sells fabric for sewing online. I currently use Shopify. I looked at the reviews for cloud services at Trustpilot and most of them are negative.
>> 
>> AWS Avg. rating 1.7 out of 5
>> https://www.trustpilot.com/review/aws.amazon.com?page=2
>> 
>> Digital Ocean Avg. rating 2.0 out of 5
>> https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalocean.com
>> 
>> Oracle Avg. rating 2.3 out of 5
>> https://www.trustpilot.com/review/oracle.com
>> 
>> Microsoft Azure rating 2.4 out of 5
>> https://www.trustpilot.com/review/azure.microsoft.com
>> 
>> Typical complaints are:
>> 1) Substandard or nonexistent tech support.
>> 2) Poor security. A lot of complaints about the containers being hacked.
>> 3) Devious billing practices 
>> 4) Difficult to admin.
>> 
>> Any guidance you can give me on Cloud Services would be appreciated. My take is that Containers are at the top the hype cycle.
>> 
>> Ideally, I would prefer to run my own OpenBSD Server on bare metal.
>> 
>> --
>> Kind regards,
>> Jonathan
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> sf-lug mailing list
>> sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
>> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
>> SF-LUG is at http://www.sf-lug.org/ 
>> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> sf-lug mailing list
> sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
> SF-LUG is at http://www.sf-lug.org/