I’m just a programmer and I hate dealing with servers. Most of my background is Laravel and the creator of Laravel created Laravel Forge which is a service that pretty much allows unlimited one click deployments to several cloud/vps providers for just $10 a month. I think that this kind of service is extremely helpful and also can be very profitable for the one who would create it.
That service also includes load balancer, basic security, free SSL, etc.
Of course this is over my head, but if anyone would like to do it, I would definitely use it.
What do you think? Is it feasible for Elixir?
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It’s definitely doable but since the market is so small at the moment I would guess it will take time before something like this materializes.
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Hmm, would there be any demand for server hosting of simple erlang/elixir setups (say inside docker images or so)? I have quite a powerful server that is about to go unused (16 core, 64gigs ram, etc… etc…) and instead of getting rid of it I could always setup such systems. If not enough interest in it to supplant its cost then I will probably just get rid of it. How would I go about finding out if there is interest though?
My best guess would be building something similar on top of a service like Tutum. Right now, I generally just advocate for Heroku if you don’t want to deal with servers. It really just depends on how many of those apps are production vs experimental in terms of the price.
There are a lot of options out there built on Docker like Tutum. Dokku is another and it looks like that guy is building a service on top of it called Dokkur.
IMO one of the biggest reasons something like Laravel Forge works is the way that PHP works. PHP scales down better that just about anything else out there. You have a 512mb of RAM server with 1TB of code on it and everything will run depending on traffic levels. Other languages, Elixir included, boot up which makes this strategy less viable.
For what it’s worth, I’d never managed a server before in my life whenever I signed up for Slicehost a decade ago and they had so many great tutorials and articles that I learned an absolute ton about running my own servers. The most important thing that I learned is that it’s really not nearly as hard and over-complicated as people make it - especially if you just need one server. If you need a load balancer, multiserver configuration, deployments, updates, monitoring, etc there’s more involved of course but Elixir will help you stretch a single server far enough that your usage might never become an issue.
Digital Ocean has become the new Slicehost (Rackspace bought Slicehost). It’s cheap and has tons and tons of excellent tutorial articles for setting up your instance, installing your database, basic security practices etc. Even if you’ve never done it before you can be totally setup in a few of hours just by following the articles and you’ll learn a lot in the process. If you’ve never done it, it’s very much worth doing just for the learning experience if nothing else.
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This is the simplest solution I have tried yet 
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