Does anyone have suggestions on where to host a website that would include interfaces for my sparkcore?
I don’t have the background (/desire) to host my own, and I don’t want to spend as much as places like godaddy charge (and don’t know if I could even use it for something like spark webapps). I’m also not sure what characteristics i should be looking for in a company.
Sorry if that isn’t specific enough, any help would be great, thanks!
what platform are you using to develop and deploy your web apps? what language and tools?
for general hosting, there are many options. i have used Amazon Web Services (AWS) and am pretty happy with it. when i signed up, they offered a free tier, which meant you could host one resource restricted virtual machine running a linux distro for free for a year. after a year, i think it turns to ~$15/month.
i am not sure if they have that deal anymore, but i think they do. you can get more powerful VM’s, but it will cost you more, of course. for simple, non-commercial Spark web apps, it will probably be plenty.
Honestly: no real idea yet! I’m still a beginner, so nothing complicated, maybe javascript to start and then if I need something else learn that. Part of the problem with picking something out is that I don’t know what I’ll need in the future. All I’ve got right now are some spark cores and a domain name (my name was available so I bought that first and figured I could find the rest out later).
javascript and node.js are probably good places to start here, that is what the cloud uses and so you will have a wealth of great examples to work from. of course, learning something new and challenging is also fun, and any choice could probably do the job well. in the end, the best tool is usually what you are most comfortable using.
please ask away if you think of anything else you need.
Even though you said you didn’t want to host it yourself, a raspberry pi seems like a good option. Since you don’t know yet what you’re going to program in, the Pi provides nice flexibility. It can run nodeJS, along with a web server, can contain databases, and pretty much anything else you’ll need for a website. If it’s for personal use only, then it’s more than capable. It should also be cheaper than external hosting, with a price tag of (€30,~$40), compared to the recurring charges of hosts. As far as setting it up goes, there are plenty of tutorials available, and even all-in-one files to download, so you shouldn’t be scared off by that. I don’t think you need much/any background at all to set up a Pi.
But the choice is yours, thought I’d just drop in my two cents. Whichever way you choose, good luck, and don’t hesitate to ask for help!
I generally run a VM on my home PC running Ubuntu and run a website on that for all testing. Just point your spark core to your internal ip address until you are happy you want the world to see it.
Then I copy my files over to a digitalocean server - you can just install the same ubuntu on it as you have in your VM at home. The $5 per month server is pretty capable and you can install any language you like on it. You can even just play around with the digitalocean servers for a few hours if you like and add and delete them at will. You will get charged about 0.7c per hour to use them. If you delete them at the end there are no more charges after that.
I think my digitalocean account lets me send $10 credits to people - I can find that out if you are interested.
I found an alternative host recently. I haven’t tried it myself, but on paper it looks good.
€3 per month.
4 core, 2GB ram, 50GB ssd
Scaleway is a bare metal server. You choose and run a Linux distribution. Then it’s all up to you to get Apache or other web server running and you admin the whole thing.
Versus
A web site hosting service.
Depending on what you want to do with it, you could get away with a github site. The Particle Javascript SDK works nicely on it, if you don’t want to do too fancy things.
DigitalOcean is neat too
@stevech - true, although I found getting started with Particle devices a lot harder than setting up a web server in Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install lamp-server^It looks like you are new to the industry and don’t know much about hosting. You may go to Cloudways for the managed cloud hosting. Since you are new to the club it will help you evenly as they will manage the server for you. Moreover, they have excellent customer support which provides 24/7 help to you. You can select any server as they have varieties of cloud server. But since, you are not looking for a healthy budget. I suggest DigitalOcean will work fine for you.