Don't selfhost. I know a lot of people in IT-sec / ethical hacking here in Germany from the CCC (Chaos Computer Club). It's not the secure and sensible thing to do in your home with opening ports and not doing these things:
-seperating your home LAN and the server properly
-having a real (business) firewall
Real enterprise hosting has ofc. a better uptime/reliability than your homeconnection.
And a RPI is way too weak and whacky. A 24/7 running server also costs a little bit of energy. (energy prices are high here in Germany for example)
For your project, you could use cheap VPS (virtual private server) with root access and a little traffic. You won't need much and you can still upgrade later.
People here use Hetzner or Uberspace i think. Or netcup.
Selfhosting with installing the infrastructure, the web server, setting up database, some web dev, installing a free lets encrypt SSL certifcate etc.,
but it's manageable to learn, it's fun and then you have a lot of control / power in your project.
Be careful with AI and i wouldn't slopcode all of the website / web dev, but setting up the linux server basic with a good AI should be no problem, i'm an advanced linux user and work in IT administration / active directory + domain structure. Also some Linux and virtualization. And i think AI could replace my whole job on a technical level. But i still have to hold the hands of the employes here at the university.
I feel sorry for software developers and web devs. And yeah, in many ways i think AI is stealing, breaking copyright, using other works and unethical on many levels. But that is another topic. Still useful for technical IT stuff sometimes.
Ofc you should always doublecheck, when using or learning with AI.
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Well, the rpi was not exposed (at least, I think). I used one of those free dynamic DNS services to map the HTTP port to a web address. The internet made requests to the web address received from that service, which redirected the request to my router, which finally forwarded to the rpi (like a reverse proxy, if I remember correctly). But I thought only HTTP requests could pass.. was I wrong?
..yes, HTTP beacause I was still reading how to get an HTTPS certificate 😅
Thanks, I will have a look at those services.
Oh, no AI in the code, 100% handmade 😆
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I've used Github Pages for SG Minesweeper and Cloudflare (IIRC) for SG Memory. The Minesweeper game has no backend per se, but the Memory Game uses Cloudflare infrastructure for the backend, Workers + D1 IIRC
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Yeah, the host is Github. It makes it super easy to publish your repo since you don't have to even enable other apps to access it, but there are limitations imposed by the host (Github in this case). I didn't try to host a backend server on Github but Cloudflare could host the back and Github the front. Worth researching at least
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Not "better", just "statistically plausibly". Which is often far from good. In case of a $$$-related recommendation, it can easily be influenced by services advertising themselves.
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Many SG puzzle websites are client-side with no data persistence. They encode the puzzle in the URL. This is free and super easy using things like Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages. The drawback is that this can only host 100% static websites, there's no server-side application process running.
Another problem with this approach for puzzles is that, in order to verify there's a unique solution to the puzzle, you need to be able to solve it programmatically. By sending the solver to the client you give users an easy way to cheat.
If you are sure you need a backend and database, I would look at managed web hosting next, since it is simple and economic (example: https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/). This is very beginner friendly because they often have guides or templates, and they take care of backups and most configurations. A lot of website hosting services also offer you a domain name and automatic scaling. Their dashboards are also made to be easy to use. Deploying a website is usually done just by pushing your code to GitHub.
If you want more control over what is installed and what processes run, the next step would be a VPS, as other people have suggested. This is basically a computer connected to the internet, so you take care of everything. I don't recommend you to do this unless you actually need to (or you enjoy learning at the expense of some headaches). For affordable VPS providers, I have used Hetzner in the past and it's been really good.
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I just use a cheap "bare metal" server from OVH. Obviously not free, but if you wait for promos you might find some around 12€/month. Mine's some very old Xeon (E5-1620 v2) with 32 GB of RAM, at that price. Way too much for what I do (and for what it seems you want to do), but I occasionally use the spare computing power for ffmpeg tasks.
You'll get all the headaches from managing an OS fully, but none of the headaches from maintaining some hardware at your place. Nor the electricity bills.
Alternatively, as others mentioned, you can also go the VPS route. Even cheaper, but a lot less power (and so a significantly worse power/price ratio).
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Yeah, Heroku is owned by Salesforce now (actually has been for about 6 years now), so there's not a lot of motivation for a free tier there.
Lots of good other recommendations in here. But yeah, Heroku is really cool tech, but no longer intended for individual people/projects. It's very much positioned for businesses.
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I do not mean those single page sites you can host on wordpress, I mean full–fletched sites, with a backend, database and so on.
My current need is for a small site with node and postgres. I say small because the users are estimated to be in the tens range.. but I dream to expand it someday, maybe adding one of those cool puzzles to post here.
The first research pointed me to heroku, which gave a free tier, but my site was nowhere near ready, and now the free tier is gone.
I have checked the possibility to host on google, aws and some more, but I find it quite complicated to understand how much it would cost me.
So, I was self hosting on an old raspberry I own but it has given more headaches than anything. Last thing, there have been some work in town and they cut off the electricity; when the power went back, poor rpi was a complete mess, commands missing and other weird stuff.
I could format it and retry, but I decided to look for an alternative and keep it as a last resort.
So, here I am.
This is the only community I frequent (is this the right word in this case?)
I see quite a handful sites related to sg, and I can only imagine how many more you have for other projects.
How/Where do you host them?
Of course, I'd like a completely free option, but I'm starting to doubt it exists.. still, if it's not too expensive, I could think about it.
Or, do you think it's better to change something in my environment to save on money?
Any of you that self hosts? Maybe a newer rpi (or one of those mini PC) could be enough..
What do you think are the minimum hardware requirements? Anything else I should keep in mind?
What do you think?
Thanks :)
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