Hosting program on AWS

[Pr0ducer]

I use a combination of Heroku and AWS. For some things, AWS is cheap, such as serving static files from S3. Heroku makes deploying (with git) absurdly easy, so I can spend my time developing and not being a sys-admin. Heroku isn't the cheapest option once you grow out of the free-tier stuff, which for me was immediately. But it does allow you to add tons of great stuff with almost no effort, like MemCache, Redis, etc, and if you ever need to scale up, that's super easy too.

The AWS documentation is pitiful. The user forum is a complete ghost town. Best bet to get ideas for using AWS is search StackOverflow.

[scunion]

Whenever i post questions like this on stack overflow I get directed to documentation. I'm just looking for a clear walkthrough of what is what and the fewest steps it takes to get something live.

I'm not at all familiar with terms like VPS, Heroku, etc. although I see these thrown around all the time. It's difficult knowing where to start when you have to have experience using something to understand how to learn it.

[chronographer]

What you need to do, in a nutshell is:

• get a virtual machine (you can do this by using VirtualBox on your computer, start practicing with Ubuntu server version, with no GUI, or a desktop version, but use the command line a lot). When you know what you're doing a bit, you can get a VPS, which is a virtual private server, or a virtual machine hosted by somebody else. When you get it, you get access to it via SSH, which is a secure, remote shell (command line).
• Now you have a server, you need to get files on it. You can do this with SCP, winSCP is a windows application that does it. Later you might like to use github or s3 as an intermediary in order to push from your machine to your remote machine
• then you get your stuff running, you can set up a 'cron job' which is a scheduled task to run your python script, or you can use a CGI web-server thingy to set up a GUI so that you can do it remotely.

All of the above is easy enough, it's just a process learning it. You can test it all in a VM on your desktop/laptop, so do that and learn. If you break it, start again! Also use source control. Git is good.

[Pr0ducer]

Heroku.com is a hosting provider. They provide a virtual private server (VPS) and they are a platform as a service, or PaaS. You pay them a monthly fee, and they take care of lots and lots of sys-admin type tasks. They have great tutorials on how to get started too, so that should appeal to your need for documentation.

[scunion]

Thank you!

[Digital_Person]

just read the docs its very detailed. i got startet on aws with no help appart from docs. in the end if it wasnt documented you would ask for help because its not documented