You can easily get a VPS for around $5/month from quality vendors. You can probably find a lot of offers around $1/month for a VPS on lowendbox, lowendtalk, and webhostingtalk.
If you want more oomph than that, you can find dedicated server offers at those three places, starting around maybe $30/month. Typically pretty old systems, but I enjoy having a whole ancient box rather than one core in a vm on a modern box. My personal hosting needs are tiny though, so I could fit back into the VPS if money were an issue.
Hijacking the thread: also looking for some super cheap VPS for running Go servers (don’t need more than 256-512 MB). I know i have digitalocean for ~$5/month, but i’m looking for something more like $1 or €2 per month.
What’s the stack?
Why is AWS expensive? What’s the most costly?
Why vercel? I’ve heard it gets costly at scale here on HN no other data points.
Does the charity have the ability to operate it? Budget? Skills? If not what the plan?
AWS lambda + API gateway. I use serverless to deploy to these.
If traffic is high, this could get pricy. For example, i have a site up getting about 20,000k visitors a day, hitting it many times each and it's probably costing me $400/month whereas a $50 server would probably do the trick (it's a temporary thing that i'm migrating away soon). But I have a bunch of smaller projects with a few visitors a day and the cost rounds to $0.
The nice thing is that it'll basically scale infinitely when you need it to.
I really like fly.io, but you’d need to provide more information about the kind of backend and the expected load. Also what does it currently cost?
I host a few sites on fly for pennies, but they don’t see a lot of traffic.
Hey - get in touch with me at Zuplo. If this is for a charity, we might be able to swing you a really cheap deal.
Have you looked at Amazon Lightsail? It's relatively cheap if you don't need a lot of scale, compared to other cheap alternative. Oracle free tier is another option.
You can build your own backend server on https://console.hetzner.cloud/
If the initial effort can be big, all you really need to do is to move your API/Backend to API Gateway and Lambda (with throttling applied), then for databases, just get a dedicated EC2 instance and host stuff manually, with periodic syncs to S3 for backups.
Most of AWS services exist because people are either too lazy or not knowledgeable enough on how to set up their own stuff on EC2.
Everyone here is suggesting various cloud offerings, and that's probably the way to go.
However, cheap used mini PCs from the likes of HP can be had for very little or even free if you find an office that's replacing them with new ones. Plop on of those at home, and your recurring costs are like 20W of power
Have you looked into optimizing your AWS costs? Where is most of it going? Compute, storage, bandwidth?
Cheapest is to fit within someone's free tier (e.g. Oracle), but I'm leery of that. Personally I use Hetzner's cheapest US instance which is 5 EUR/month with an IPv4 address.
Supabase + Cloudflare Workers, both have pretty generous free tiers
Pythonanywhere, Render.
Surprised that no one has mentioned Google Cloud Run. I’ve started multiple services with it this year and it’s been awesome. Highly recommend.
DeployHQ+VPS (Hetzner, Vultr, DO, etc)
I'm paying $0.45 for my personal lambda/dynamodb based service. but my traffic is very low.
Get some cloud servers at Hetzner, you'll get what you need for XX euros per month.
Oracle cloud has free tier with 4 arm vcpus/24G ram/200GB SSD.
Google app engine, you can run for free.
Lightsail on AWS, fixed pricing
depending on the performance you need (and ofc region).. for eu i can recommend: 1&1, (they have 1€ vps), hetzner, alphavps
Localhost.
Elestio
Hi! AWS Developer Advocate here. Depending on the nonprofit/charity status it's possible they could qualify for free or reduced price hosting. There are a few different programs that you could qualify for.
There is also the Techsoup organization, which helps nonprofits and charities with technology needs: https://page.techsoup.org/amazon-web-services-for-nonprofits
I would highly recommend looking through there for not just AWS specific tools & services, but a wide variety of solutions that might help this charity.
Please feel free to reach out directly to me for additional assistance. Hope this helps!