I've been using heroku recently, but am wondering as to alternatives people use. This is just for hobbyist development and I'm fairly cost-conscious at the moment.
It makes it super easy to get up and running on Digital Ocean and http://laravel.com/docs/homestead provides a quick and easy VM to match what forge sets up on Digital Ocean.
Plus it's easy to setup multiple small projects on the same droplet. Forge is $10/mo but it supports Laravel and does save time setting up and configuring Digital Ocean along with easy deployment.
DigitalOcean, spend a couple of hours getting a server setup that covers your general stack and then save it as an image. Then in the future you can just boot a new server on that image for $5 p/m.
Host it on Digital Ocean. You can host multiple projects on same Droplet. When the traffic/load picks up for one project and can't be handled on one droplet, you can spin it out to a separate droplet. When load increases further, upgrade the droplet to larger expensive plan.
I started out with $5 droplet for my projects. Now one of my project that gained traction is on $10 droplet and rest still on $5 droplet.
Personally I avoid any PaaS/IaaS that require custom development hooks specific to their platforms to maintain my operational and hosting flexibility.
I still don't quite understand the value proposition behind DO and why people have started using it over AWS. So far I understand that it has a nice interface and is a bit (but not much) cheaper for certain server configurations. But that can't be all, right?
Could anyone explain why DO is becoming so popular?
AWS is akin to building your car by buying and installing one part at a time. DO is akin to buying a Honda Fit. AWS is good when you got Cadillac budget. AWS has a sweet spot. When your needs are too small or too large, AWS is not the right solution.
AWS integration is complex due to multitude of services priced separately and need to be integrated separately. For early stage projects, this creates unnecessary complexity. The costs of these services quickly add up too.
As you embed more and more AWS services into your projects, you become locked in and unable to migrate off quickly. That is when AWS tells you to bend over and empty your pockets. You lose flexibility to move.
I have primarily investigated minimal of services on AWS and DO and found DO to better and quickly fit my needs.
If you're using Laravel check out https://forge.laravel.com/.
It makes it super easy to get up and running on Digital Ocean and http://laravel.com/docs/homestead provides a quick and easy VM to match what forge sets up on Digital Ocean.
Plus it's easy to setup multiple small projects on the same droplet. Forge is $10/mo but it supports Laravel and does save time setting up and configuring Digital Ocean along with easy deployment.