carlosarli

Small Phoenix websites - most cost efficient deployment options?

Hello everyone,
As a way to pay my bills while attending university, I started a small web design business for local businesses here in Wales. Most of the time I generally just use something like Squarespace simply because it allows me to build quick simple sites, do it cheaply, fast and after going live I rarely have to worry about them.
Now since I have been bitten by the elixir bug, I have done some projects in elixir and Phoenix, and today I got a new client that needs a simple website and I thought why not do it in Phoenix?.
Now, although this website might be extended in the future, right now it is a very simple site that will just have a couple of forms and such and a bunch of static pages. I know phoenix is probably overkill, but I just feel like deploying a full phoenix app and starting small seems smart.
The main problem I have is that these kind of customers want to pay very little and for that reason I am not too keen on managing the application frequently unless I get paid to add content or features.
What would you think is the best deploy and forget platform? should I go with heroku or something along those lines?
I am a total newbie here, so just looking for opinions/suggestions
Thank you very much
Carlo

14 comments

/phoenix #deployment #devops

2 4629 14

2018-05-23 16:19:46 UTC

First Post!

AstonJ

Many web design companies start of with a VPS (about £30 a month) and once you get enough clients you could move up to a dedicated server

I’m not sure how much flexibility you get with a VPS in terms of shell access etc, so you may want to look at cloud hosting providers as that way your client is billed for what they use.

Check out this mega-thread for options:

You may also want to look at Gigalixir: Platform-as-a-Service designed just for Elixir/Phoenix (they also have a free option).

Post #1

Most Liked

jdumont

I don’t want to be the party-pooper, but to be honest I wouldn’t want to use Elixir for a client project, unless there was a compelling reason to do so.

Most of the time, a simple CMS (my preference is Statamic or similar) or even static site generator if content updates aren’t a big deal are the best options, purely because they save you a ton of time and can be deployed almost anywhere for pennies. Once up, they are usually bulletproof.

If the site you’re building is just static, then Elixir and Phoenix are massively overkill for the task (static site = static HTML to my mind). If your clients need to edit content, then you have to build out not just the front of the site, but the admin/control panel. Don’t underestimate that, it’s a huge task.

Admittedly I just moved my site from a fully static one to a Phoenix app, but that’s because it’s my own and a pet project. I’m happy to constantly be fiddling with it.

From a business perspective, it’s best to go with the option that meets the clients needs now (don’t overbuild “for the future”), is quick and easy to work with (less time = more money) and stable and cheap in production (you don’t want to be the person they call when it crashes at 4 in the morning).

Just my tuppence worth, but I’ve found life a lot calmer by sticking to simple solutions and the right tool for the job.

Post #3

jesse

I’m the founder of gigalixir.com in case you have any questions or need any help. Also happy to hand out free credits to anyone who upgrades to the standard plan. Just direct message me.

Post #8

AstonJ

Personally I am not a fan of off the shelf CMS systems for client sites unless you know they are alway going to be incredibly simple - because when you want to do something custom, you either can’t or you have to learn their (usually not great) system.

When your client then asks you to add something to their site, and you tell them you can’t or you’ll have to ‘look into it’ it reflects on you and their confidence in you begins to erode. Ideally, when your client calls you and asks for something you want to say it’s not a problem and you’ll send them a quote

The only exceptions (for me anyway) are CMS systems based on web frameworks like Rails or Phoenix/Elixir - because in those you usually can do anything you want as they’re just built on top of the framework you are familiar with anyway and might have used otherwise.

Post #5

Last Post!

stratigos

I also enjoy gigalixir and find it to be a great platform for simple, lightweight, and small Elixir/Phoenix apps. I simply havent used the platform enough to evaluate it for bigger projects.

Heroku is also just fine for Phoenix apps, plus it has a richer ecosystem for diagnostic, logging, and metrics tools.

Post #14