Where should I deploy my new app?

If I were you I'd stick with what you know for now - sounds like you have trust with then and a good service relationship. No harm in trying out amazon/digital ocean too though for $5/10 a month. Scaling is often application specific in a lot of ways - sometimes you need to scale your DB back-end, sometimes caching, sometimes ... etc so you'd probably need to see what provider suited your wallet for what you needed to do :-)

Somewhat of an aside, but on the scaling front, I remember reading an article many years ago by the techies who ran the website for the 'Big Brother' reality show. Eventually due to the massive load they gave up on it being 'actually' dynamic and would just continuously (re)render static html then rsync it to a load of servers :-) Sometimes low-tech hacks wins out :-)

AWS will give you the most flexibility and almost instantaneous scaling but it's complex. I tend to go with linode. You can resize your server, etc but it usually takes 20 minutes or so.

Go with what you know. Just be sure you can deploy properly. Specifically permission and proper set up with your public folder.

I use DO but because I use forge and envoyer. At work we use aws. Aws is definitely amazing but isn't cost effective unless you need the options and power it provides. (Meaning traffic and amazing performance along with features it provides).

Any thoughts on Heroku? It looks really intriguing and easy.

Not sure if this helps, but I should probably mention that my new app is very disk I/O heavy with saving new high res images and deleting old images. It's also very memory hungry as image resizing and image manipulation are among it's core feature set. A typical image resize process can easily use 20 MB of memory.

If you fairly good at linux administration stay with a vps, any configuration is possible, much cheaper. FOr 12 € I have 2 cores, 8gb RAM. You can decide if you want 60GB SSD (for I/O heavy tasks) or 320GB SAS. If you want a basic server you get one for 6€ and combine a couple of them for security or performance. If you're not so good at linux administration go to a cloud. At the end it will be cheaper

@tptompkins

https://uploadcare.com

Might be something to better your app?

Wow that looks like a great option that I never knew existed! Unfortunately, for me that won't work since what we're doing is very specialized image manipulation and the security requirements are very high. I'll definitely keep that site in mind for future projects though.

@tptompkins Interesting. Still mystified over your 'Hashing Routes' solution and you have moved on to architecture. Since you have not specified what your application requirements are how could one possibly size anything. Just eyeballing the difference between Digital Ocean and Wired Tree leads to many questions. And your security requirements are very high. Hmm perhaps the NSA has free space on retired server farms somewhere?

@jimmck lol! Where are the NSA cloud services when you need them?!

Not to detract from the current thread, but in the "route hashing" post you're referring to, I was basically just trying to generate a random token and for some reason I thought it'd be a good idea to use bcrypt for that. Totally unnecessary in that specific case. The str_random() function does exactly what I was looking for.

In regards to my app, it's basically a steganography as a service app called Undercover Pics. The app basically allows you to choose a secret photo and a cover photo, then securely encrypts and embeds the secret image into the cover image so that you can store the resulting "undercover pic" on any device. Later, you or your friends can come back to decode through the app with the password when you want to view the secret.

Nice!!!

@tptompkins What do dinosaurs have to do with pictures?

@jimmck Ahhh...I get it - "Steganography" like "Stegosaurus" lol! Sorry for the delayed laugh. That one took me a while.

This just might be a marketing tactic, but one thing I liked about Wired Tree is their "ServerShield® Security" server hardening - https://www.wiredtree.com/support-services/servershield-server-hardening/.

How "hardened" is the security of Forge + Digital Ocean provisioned servers?

It's not the most secure way to set that kind of stuff up. You'd still have to adjust some stuff yourself if you want it to be as secure as possible. But it's fine for 99% of cases.

Recently started using Forge with a VPS from Linode, and it's really smooth, but if you want more customization you can setup Plesk on a VPS/dedicated server, it has built in Composer support and it will have automatic deployments from Git in Plesk Onyx.

@melkhior Is there any particular reason why you went with Linode over Digital Ocean?

@tptompkins They recently upgraded the amount of RAM in their VPSes, it's $10 for 2GB of RAM which is pretty nice.

Also, I don't like DigitalOcean's very strict DDoS policy, one script kiddie and your VPS gets null-routed for 2 hours.

As long as you can upload an image in .00001 sec @jimmck will like it very much. But seriously as long as you have a good company I would stick with it and just simply implement the proper security.