Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of websites, web applications, APIs, and other services that I’ve built and continue to host publicly. I’ve experimented with a lot of different hosting methods for them, switched between several different providers, and have finally arrived at something that I feel comfortable with that meets all my needs.

There are nearly infinite options available for hosting software today and more come come out every day. However, many articles and guides you’ll find online for this kind of thing are either from public cloud providers or companies with massive infrastructure, complex application needs, and huge amounts of traffic.

I wanted to write this up mostly to share the decisions I made for the architecture and why I’ve done things the way I have. Although my needs are much smaller-scale and I don’t currently charge any money for anything I’m running, I still want to provide the best possible experience for my sites’ users and protect all the work I’ve put into my projects.

Hardware

I run everything off of a single dedicated server from OVH hosted in Hillsboro, Oregon. I chose that location because I live in Seattle and get nice ping to it from my apartment. Ping from the East Coast USA is usually <100ms, which I find acceptable. I pay ~$85/month for it after taxes. This is pretty expensive and it's honestly more than I need, but I care deeply about my sites and the other things I've built and host there, so I am happy to pay for a nice server to host them.

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