[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS
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Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS
I'm developing an app to help foreign Buddhist monks in Thailand
learn Thai and Pali languages. The app incorporates LLMs for
interactive learning, and I'm experimenting with spaced repetition
techniques within chatbot interfaces and for long-form text
memorization. Right now I'm running everything on AWS, but the
cost feels overkill for my current needs. Since my past
professional background is in AWS, it was the default choice, but
given that this project is currently funded through my own savings
and I'm currently unemployed, I'm looking to minimize costs.
Scalability isn't a concern as the user base is small. Currently
I'm using 3rd party LLM APIs, but in the future I may want to
explore serving open-source models that I fine-tune specifically
for language learning and Buddhist text exploration. Does anyone
have recommendations for budget friendly alternatives that would
suit these needs? Ideally, something that could handle a future
transition to self-hosted models if needed. Also, if anyone has
experience with applying spaced repetition or other memorization
techniques to chatbot interfaces and long-form text retention, I'd
love to hear your thoughts.
Author : sjayasinghe
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-01-23 00:24 UTC (2 days ago)
| lunarcave wrote:
| Have you tried applying to AWS Activate? I'm not sure whether
| they support non-profits, but if you can swing it, they'll
| subsidise your compute and some model costs.
|
| In terms of a budget friendly alternatives, definitely look into
| fly.io. We have a AWS setup, but run some compute for ephemeral
| use cases in fly.io.
|
| > Also, if anyone has experience with applying spaced repetition
| or other memorization techniques to chatbot interfaces and long-
| form text retention, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
|
| Have some experience with conversational experiences and LLMs. It
| all depends on what the modality of the interaction is. Is it
| something that users can have a long chat conversation with? Or
| is it more like the anki experience where "flashcards" get
| presented to you?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Few things beats a cheap, powerful Hetzner server, IMO. I host a
| LOT of stuff on my single EUR40/month box. 20 core, 64 gb ram, 1
| TB ssd, unmetered network.
|
| They have GPU-backed servers too, obviously theyre more
| expensive, and not ideal for your usecase maybe.
|
| Modal is a good serverless alternative if you want to scale to
| zero and be able to handle spiky loads.
| dcminter wrote:
| Sounds like that might work for OP while they're using APIs,
| but if they decide to run models locally can you get GPU
| equipped servers from Hetzner?
|
| Edit: Not sure if I misread, or if you edited, but I see you
| addressed this, and yes in that case sounds like this would be
| a good option if that kind of price range is ok.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yeah i edited after a minute indeed, thought I was quick
| enough for anyone to notice haha.
|
| But you really have to do the calculus, as you buy their
| cheapest servers for at least a month at a time. And with
| fluctuating loads, a serverless approach might actually be
| better.
|
| See also: replicate or runpod. But I like modal best; their
| SDK is pretty comprehensive and has a sane developer
| experience, replicate is too constrained and runpod instances
| were unavailable for me half the time...
| akudha wrote:
| How smooth is the signup process? I remember reading they
| require passport copy etc, which makes me uncomfortable
| isoprophlex wrote:
| They require extensive proof of identity. I don't mind, I
| have a EU business so I registered through that... but
| there's a barrier there for sure.
| api wrote:
| It's because they get a lot of fraud. The alternative would
| be to raise their prices to compensate for theft and the cost
| of dealing with abuse.
|
| VPS providers like Vultr and Digital Ocean are a little more
| expensive but a little easier in some cases. They're still
| way cheaper than big cloud.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Good experience here w/ Vultr.com (tho v lightly used). It
| was Derek Sivers' recommendation. https://sive.rs/ti
| krab wrote:
| Not in my experience (I have a EU address and payment card).
|
| The sign up was smooth and easy.
| akudha wrote:
| I have an American address and card. I suppose I have to
| provide extensive documentation then?
| krab wrote:
| Not sure. Maybe only if the account is flagged somehow? I
| just registered - there's a simple form that takes a card
| in the end. And that was just it. I could order a server.
| api wrote:
| Cloud markup over bare metal and wholesale bandwidth is
| astronomical. Like hundreds to thousands of times in some
| cases. If you don't actually need the managed services and
| other capabilities offered by big cloud, it's down right stupid
| to use it.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| How do you handle CI/CD-style automatic deployments with no
| downtime on dedicated servers? I'm looking for The Perfect (tm)
| solution myself.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| Put everything behind a reverse proxy, then set up automated
| blue/green deployments. It's extremely trivial for OP's scale
| of application.
| tomwojcik wrote:
| Hn moment. Blue green with zero downtime on a VPS is not
| extremely trivial. Simple for some, at best.
| dcminter wrote:
| I'd think in terms of running this on a PC in my spare room if I
| was trying to keep costs down and the usage wasn't going to be
| all that high. Depending on how many concurrent users you're
| expecting, and if you do something with open source models, then
| Ollama running on a very not-top-tier GPU is likely to be a good
| bet.
| rvz wrote:
| > Right now I'm running everything on AWS, but the cost feels
| overkill for my current needs. Since my past professional
| background is in AWS, it was the default choice, but given that
| this project is currently funded through my own savings and I'm
| currently unemployed, I'm looking to minimize costs. Scalability
| isn't a concern as the user base is small.
|
| Given that this doesn't make any money, you might as well use
| local or self-hosted LLMs instead of cloud based LLMs.
|
| AWS for this use-case (especially when you are not intending to
| make money) is indeed overkill.
| yoaviram wrote:
| If you form a real nonprofit AWS will give you up to 5000 USD per
| year.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/nonpr...
| amanda99 wrote:
| Specifics on this: if you have a US 501(c)3 with less than $1m
| in revenue, you need to pay TechSoup ~$100 to get $1k in
| credits.
| nottorp wrote:
| A Thailand nonprofit? Or only US nonprofit?
| ggregoire wrote:
| First line in the article: "Providing up to $5,000 in AWS
| Promotional Credit to nonprofits around the world"
| amanda99 wrote:
| They use TechSoup.org (whose site appears to be down rihgt
| now), but you can look up on that website information on who
| qualifies in Thailand. TS does the regional verification of
| what is a good enough not profit.
| password4321 wrote:
| Though not intended for reliable, professional, and/or commercial
| use, Oracle Always Free0 is free cloud VPS (24GB RAM [ARM],
| 200GB, 10TB transfer, IP) and Scaleway Stardust1 is no-
| additional-cost data transfer capped at 100mbps (EUR3.43/mo: 1GB
| RAM, 10GB, IP). Maybe it goes without saying, but don't mess
| around on the info requested when creating an account - they
| won't.
|
| If you're not interested in sysadmin work... well, that's what
| you're paying extra for! I've never bothered but you can find
| discussions of open source PaaS options here on HN keword Dokku2.
|
| I see no reason not to buy or repurpose a dedicated
| laptop/Raspberry Pi/NUC and host everything on your own home
| internet connection while getting started. This helps separate
| concerns a bit; less secure would be a VM (probably ok) or even
| docker container (yikes!). Cloudflare Tunnel3 is a free endpoint
| vs. NAT port forwarding exposing your home IP.
|
| I can't provide the voice of experience regarding self-hosted
| LLMs, but there have been a few HN discussions on building your
| own. You might find a deal on a near-dead GPU and can buy
| 'without graphics card' gaming machines capable of powering them
| from others reselling after pulling new GPUs.
|
| 0https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free
|
| 1https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances
|
| 2https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dokku%20comments%3E0
|
| 3https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...
| betaby wrote:
| 'Oracle Always Free' is routinely canceled after 2-3 months,
| however I heard some people using it for years without issues.
| huksley wrote:
| Have you tried to provision them? Those free instances are
| usually out of capacity
|
| Edit: replied to the wrong comment
| password4321 wrote:
| I believe there is usually Always Free ARM capacity in the
| non-default data center but it's been a while.
| password4321 wrote:
| For me, instances not accessed for 30 days have been deleted.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I can second Hetzner, I went from spending about $40 a month to
| $5 a month to host two blogs.
|
| The ID verification seems to be a bit random, I didn't have any
| issues with it. I would suggest looking at how much you're
| actually spending per month, and then think about how much time
| and effort moving to another provider will be.
|
| There's a very good chance you'll end up spending so much time
| moving this to another provider, you could have used that time to
| find work opportunities or do something else worthwhile. AWS
| credits are pretty easy to get, assuming you haven't gotten them
| before.
| Maro wrote:
| Sign up for a $25/mo dedicated server on OVHCloud, you can use it
| as a cloud devbox, host your blog, ssh-tunnel for VPN, run
| projects like this on it, etc. You can still call AWS APIs if you
| want.
| amluto wrote:
| This probably doesn't make sense at your particular scale, but
| colo space can be surprisingly inexpensive, and it's kind of fun
| at least until you get bored. In my local not-particularly-cheap
| market, a full rack with 120V/20A, 1Gbps Internet, and more
| cooling than you probably need costs about $400/mo. There is no
| particular requirement to put rack mount servers in it, although
| something with remote management capability is probably a good
| idea.
|
| You can fit a _lot_ of storage in there, and while you won't get
| AWS-level availability or durability, the price, latency and IOPS
| will blow AWS out if the water, as long as you 're using those
| IOPS and bandwidth within the same facility. Similarly, you can
| fit quite a bit of compute, but you'll start needing to pay for
| more power if you need more than a couple servers worth.
|
| At your scale, Hetzner is probably a better idea.
| randometc wrote:
| What AWS services are you using currently and what drives your
| costs?
|
| We're a nonprofit with apps that see ~1000s of users a month, but
| mostly in the US. I think we see good savings using Google Cloud
| Run and scaling down when there's less traffic. You could
| probably set up AWS Fargate similarly. Modern app frameworks
| start quickly so cold starts aren't terrible. Docker containers
| are portable if you outgrow that kind of environment and want to
| shift to dedicated VMs or the other way to serverless in future.
| I would also look at fly.io.
| pryelluw wrote:
| How many users and bandwidth do you estimate to have and use ? Do
| you store a lot of assets (images, video, sound)?
| zachlatta wrote:
| We are a nonprofit and are in the process of switching all of our
| hosting over to Coolify. It's been great. We've moved 13 apps
| over to it so far.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| What's your current resource usage? Memory/CPU/disk etc?
|
| netcup.eu has instances that are generally about the best value
| you'll find anywhere. They've been around a long time and good
| rep.
|
| buyvm.net while not quite as cheap as a random lowend host (keep
| in mind there are lots of fly-by-night lowend hosts with crazy
| prices (buyvm is NOT one of those)), and harder to find VM
| vacancies there, is super solid, fantastic rep, great network and
| large transfer, if you need large block device attached they have
| up to 10TB "slabs" you can attach to your VM for $5/TB/mo (you
| won't beat that pricing anywhere-- I've had one attached for a
| year or so and no issues very stable. And I definitely use the
| space). And they have a fantastic discord community and
| documentation/help, and are fast to respond to issues in their
| Discord.
|
| But in general lowendtalk.com offers section and lowendbox are
| your friend (but pay close attention to provider reviews/offer
| comments to avoid unreliable and/or fly-by-night hosts).
| krab wrote:
| It depends on your needs for reliability and how many users you
| have.
|
| If you don't mind being offline when doing maintenance
| occasionally and being down on the rare occasion when the
| hardware fails (like once in a few years) until you get the
| replacement part, then look up "server housing". You can buy a
| computer, either rack mounted, or tower, maybe used, and you put
| it into a datacenter that manages bandwidth, power and cooling.
|
| That would be probably the cheapest option but pick something
| close to where you live.
| coderintherye wrote:
| If it's a simple app, consider NearlyFreeSpeech
| https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting
|
| Easy, straight-forward no-frills hosting.
|
| Could you share the app if/when it's available somewhere? I have
| a Buddhist monk friend moving to Thailand later this year who
| would be quite interested in something such as what you
| described.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Do they support Python? I feel like that's going to be the most
| likely related stack in question..
| graemep wrote:
| Sort off. Oast time I looked it was more fiddly than PHP.
| Great for LAMP stack or static sites though.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Cloudflare is a nice option if you can adapt your system to run
| there [1]. You could also run just the frontend on CF and host
| any APIs elsewhere. Or check these sites [2] [3] with some good
| reviews and comparisons of hosting providers.
|
| Regarding spaced repetition, RemNote 1.17 an 1.18 has a bunch of
| AI features for summarizing PDFs and YouTube transcripts and
| turning that into Q&A for spaced repetition, _and_ they also have
| a Chatbot interface in-app. Perhaps you could check some of what
| they are doing for inspiration [4].
|
| --
|
| 1: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/languages/
|
| 2: https://getdeploying.com/
|
| 3: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/
|
| 4: https://www.youtube.com/@RemNote/videos
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| I am against adapting my application to fit a particular
| proprietary platform. My platform should support me, not the
| other way around.
| lloydjones wrote:
| Port it to using SST (https://sst.dev) then you can more easily
| experiment with different cloud providers' costs by deploying to
| A, B and C service.
|
| SST uses Pulumi so (per other comments) there are constructs for
| Hetzner among other budget hosts.
| lloydjones wrote:
| Hetzner (Pulumi) with SST example:
| https://github.com/prutya/next-self-hosted
|
| Hetzner (Pulumi) example outside of SST:
| https://timozander.de/blog/using-pulumi-with-hcloud/
| simonw wrote:
| What's your technology stack?
|
| If you have a Python or Node.js or similar there are a wealth of
| inexpensive options. I personally really like Fly because the
| pricing is predictable (you effectively pay per container per
| month) and it's easy to get anything that runs in Docker to run
| there. https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ starts at $1.94/month
| for a 256MB container which may be enough if your backend is
| small and efficient.
|
| Heroku is a bit more expensive but still a relatively cheap and
| very robust and proven option.
|
| If you want to maximize the performance you can get for your
| money a dedicated server from Hetzner is great value, but you'll
| have to do a lot more management than you would with a PaaS like
| Fly or Heroku.
|
| Don't spend too much time worrying about serving your own models.
| This is a MUCH harder problem - you need GPU allocations etc -
| and a whole lot more expensive. Fine-tuning models is rarely the
| right solution so I don't think it's worth assuming you'll be
| doing that. If you DO do that you can solve that hosting problem
| separately later on.
|
| (Fly have a GPU product which is great but like all GPUs it's
| expensive compared to regular hosting.)
| morphle wrote:
| $3.19 or 3,04 Euro excluding VAT per month for all website
| server, data and labour costs (1-7) over several years, including
| running the big LLM (as tested, with some large LLM's and MLX/EXO
| you might need dual 64GB servers[2], doubling the monthly cost).
|
| Explanation of the details:
|
| For 33 years[1] I've hosted several huge websites from several
| servers in several peoples homes for less than 5 euro per month.
| As a professional datacenter builder and as ISP I've never found
| a cheaper option and that is not an opinion but a deeply and
| constantly researched measurement based on hundreds of servers.
| In 2025 we lowered the price to 3 Euro per month. By sharing a
| server with other customers, we can lower the cost to below 1
| euro per month (redundant backup servers double this cost).
|
| In short, you have these costs:
|
| 1) Energy cost per kWh per year from a supplier or the levelized
| cost of electricity (LCOE) of a solar/battery, windmill/battery
| or hydro/battery system.
|
| 2) ISP or datacenter cost per Mbit/s per year for the internet
| connection, fiber optic or copper leased line, satellite.
|
| 3) Colocation or closet/attic/barn space cost per year (with
| redundant servers you need several spaces)..
|
| 4) Server hardware cost per year based on the Total Cost of
| Ownership (over the lifetime).
|
| 5) Labour setting up and maintaining the software on the server
| (excluding content) per year.
|
| 6) Labour setting up and maintaining the content (excluding
| software and maintenance cost) per year.
|
| 7) Domain name registration, IP number registration, certificate
| cost.
|
| 8) Cooling cost[3].
|
| The energy cost is highest of the world in my region (EU, The
| Netherlands) because of the inflating energy prices per kWh since
| November 2021. So you move the server to another home or
| datacenter with the lowest kWh price of the region (7.0 Euro cent
| from a hydro dam in rural Spain). Or you install solar panels and
| batteries (1.2 Euro cent per kWh LCOE).
|
| With an EUR479 M4 Mac mini server in 2024 I lowered my server's
| power from an average 12 watt (a 2006 Mac mini using 10.4-30.6
| watt and in period 1993-2006 a 20.2-31.3 watt server) to today
| (januari 2025) a 4.0-4.7 watt with an expected lifetime of 12-14
| years. The server power includes the modem and router power. If
| you need a few terabytes disk space your cost per month will go
| up by around a euro per month.
|
| In 2025 I expect the customer wil pay EUR37.21 for a year
| redundant availability of 10 TB at 1 Gbps for IP transit traffic
| per month, 16 GB DRAM unix server with 10 cores, 10 GPU cores and
| 16 neural engine (unlimited websites, email). If you would max
| out the server's 43 Trillion operations per second at max
| performance the power cost might go up 10x. Almost 3 euro per
| month for a server that can run an LLM continuously.....
|
| You might hear of hosted servers below 3 euro. They usually
| involve some discount scheme to lure new customers in. With a
| minimum price of EUR7 for the cheapest domain name and
| certificate registration (yearly, worldwide), servers maintenance
| labour of EUR30 per hour these price quotes below 3 euro per
| month usually are not based on true cost.
|
| [1] In the perod 1986-1992 we hosted email, FTP and Gopher on the
| university's unix servers with UUCP and TCP/IP. Since 1992 I
| hosted on the TCP/IP servers in my home, my friends home and
| several offices. Since 1999 we host in the EU, US, Canada with
| options for Brazil and Asia.
|
| [2] M4 Mac Mini Cluster
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBR6pHZ68Ho
|
| Anyone with experience or proof of a cheaper solution? Please
| contact me so we can bid on your knowledge.
|
| [3] I heat my rooms with several servers, so the cooling and fan
| cost are $0, even in summer during heatwaves.
| ambicapter wrote:
| I speculate that the reason it always come out cheaper in your
| calculations is because you have all the knowledge as a
| datacenter expert so you save a TON of money there.
| morphle wrote:
| >so you save a TON of money there
|
| Yes, that is a fair speculation, but it is not really true:
| everyone can save a lot, not just me. I rent out this
| knowledge to my customers, so they can save tons as well.
|
| You can test this out by actually renting a M4 Mac mini
| server for 3 Euro with me, still cheaper than most hosters
| who rent you a fraction of a server (VPS) at (for example)
| nearlyfreespeech.net or fly.io because with me you get a
| full-blown server with traffic and energy cost.
|
| My customers are companies who want to move off the cloud to
| self-hosting. They pay my labour and save tens of thousands
| per year on their hyperscaler(like AWS) and datacenter bills.
|
| The expert knowledge comes from 40 years of planning,
| simulating, building and operating several datacenters,
| servers and websites over decades and delaying hundreds of
| kilometers of optical fiber.
|
| Every time my self-host solutions have proven to be cheaper
| than hyperscalers or datacenters (data available on request.
| As you see clearly, labour cost dominate so the trick is to
| eliminate labour costs almost entirely while still have
| enough redundant low power servers in the cheapest locations.
|
| Anyone interested in a $3.19 per month server should contact
| us. We would be happy to put a redundant M4 Mac mini server
| in your location for many years. You get an almost free
| server, we get global coverage.
| lsb wrote:
| I've been running half-a-billion parameter models comfortably in
| a web browser, especially with WebGPU, and you can definitely run
| billion parameter LLMs in the browser. It becomes a heavyweight
| browser app, but if the main costs are running ML models you can
| pretty easily serve static files from a directory and let
| clients' browsers do the heavy lifting. Feel free to reach out if
| you have questions, happy to help, I've been working on language
| web apps as well
| rekl wrote:
| Fastly has the Fast Forward program. Seeing as your app is non-
| profit, perhaps their program could cover part of your
| infrastructure needs?
|
| https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward
| huksley wrote:
| I also planning to move workloads from public clouds - it is
| expensive and too complicated.
|
| I created a service to easily deploy modern apps to VPS. Like
| Vercel but separating control plane and servers.
|
| Supporting both CPU and GPU servers.
|
| Similar to Coolify but much easier and cheaper to use.
| arusland wrote:
| Hey, I am also interested in switching to some inexpensive
| servers to run my web apps, but configuring and deploying it
| can be quite a chore. What is the platform name? I heard about
| coolify, but it is so difficult to set it up on my own
| server...
| moltar wrote:
| Stay on AWS and apply for $1K credits. Just position yourself as
| a potential money making startup on the Activate application.
| It's very easy to get.
|
| Then you can get $5K ($4K actual) package by using a code from
| Mercury bank or Secret plan purchase ($200).
| moltar wrote:
| Maybe explain your stack and why it's expensive I can help
| suggest saving strategies.
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