Hosting

[Ramenhotep]

(Let me know if this shouldn't be here since it's not specifically about the project's code)

So I spoke with @mcsooks and realized we just shut down the VMs we would have used to host this. @Oliver-Akins do you have any experience with solutions like Heroku? We're leaning towards using something like that.

[Oliver-Akins]

I have direct experience with Digital Ocean's shared hosting, but I haven't looked at Heroku or Vercel recently.

[Ramenhotep]

If you think Digital Ocean is a good solution, I can definitely set us up an account with them

[Oliver-Akins]

Because we don't really need to scale the systems at all, Digital Ocean is perfectly fine for this project. They have very reasonable rates and give pretty much full control the user.

[mcsooks]

@Ramenhotep @Oliver-Akins - unless Digital Ocean's shared hosting includes socket.io and node.js, it doesn't get us more -vs- setting up a sub-domain and getting @Oliver-Akins access to it. we can technically install node.js on a shared hosted space, but we can't install socket.io is the issue.

heroku theoretically can get what we want and for not much (assuming i understand the scope of this). another option is to upgrade our current plan to a VPS, which we would then be able to have access to socket.io and node.js.

[Oliver-Akins]

@mcsooks - socket.io is installed as a node module, so it can be easily installed on pretty much any host as long as node and npm are installed.

Another possibility is I could set everything up as a docker container, which would be self-contained with all the modules, dependencies, etc. but that is something which I'm unsure of how to do at the moment so it would require some time to get that sorted out.

[mcsooks]

@Oliver-Akins - docker would be cool for consistency of setup, but not all host options have/allow docker -_-

From what I can see, Digital Ocean's "Basic" App Platform option is what you want, for $5USD/mo https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#app-platform

Following similar package, Heroku is $7/mo although we may be able to get away with using their free option it sounds like you have more experience with Digital Ocean, so I'm leaning towards working with them.

@Oliver-Akins -- is this an accurate assessment?

[Oliver-Akins]

Yeah, docker is nice but sometimes is a bit extraneous for some projects.

The 5$/month option is the one I was referring to with Digital Ocean.

I don't fully understand how Heroku really does their pricing so I can't really determine if their free option would be sufficient because I don't know what they're calling the "dyno hours".

And I absolutely have more experience with Digital Ocean as I run my personal projects on a basic package from Digital Ocean and have setup some Node webservers on them. So yeah, it's a pretty accurate assessment.

[mcsooks]

Sounds good. @Ramenhotep - let's go with Digital Ocean option. Assuming it allows multiple users, include @Oliver-Akins , yourself, and myself.

[Ramenhotep]

Okay cool I am making an account. What email accounts would you like to have invited to the Digital Ocean team?

[mcsooks]

@Ramenhotep - sukie@resonym.com for me.

[Oliver-Akins]

@Ramenhotep − oliver.akins1999@gmail.com for me.

[Oliver-Akins]

Since this has been figured out and decided upon, I'm going to close this issue, if anything else related to it comes up, we can either re-open it or start a new issue thread.