Amazon Lightsail for Hosting
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Approaching the finish line for a new series of products and I'm looking for hosting solutions:
I was previously using Shopify but the monthly fees are outrageous for what they offer ($60 USD/mo and then an extra $25ish for Sendowl to offer digital downloads)
I'm now obviously using Wordpress to create the website, and most likely going to use Amazon Lightsail to host it since it costs absolute pennies, but if anyone has any horror stories about the service or anything please let me know.
Also, does anyone know if you can setup Lightsail to offer direct downloads to users? Not through any ecommerce platform like Woocommerce but just click a link -> download file? The VI's will be very small (30mb-ish) so I assume the .5tb transfer limit won't be reached (famous last words)
Thanks in advance!
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@iamlamprey I suggest FastSpring, they offer a complete service including filehosting and user account management. The fee is 6.5% of revenue. You don't have to think about anything including being tax compliant in different countries (which is otherwise a PAIN, especially for Europe). Their fraud detection system is great. You are instantly available all over the world and fully compliant in all markets. Including local currencies.
There is no limit on file hosting including file size or number of downloads. They host on S3.
As for the website, I suggest any website builder that can do header injection (you'll need it for FastSpring implementation—literally copy and paste into header and call a function on button press) for the least amount of hassle.
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@aaronventure sorry I should have mentioned I'm planning on distributing 100% free products so I most likely can't do any sort of revenue-sharing type plan, I know Christoph uses FastSpring so I assume they're reputable, I just don't think it would be compatible with my situation
I need two things:
- stable, cheap web-hosting (the wordpress site is already pretty much finished), just need somewhere to put it
- cheap or free (& ideally obscured) file transfers for small (~80mb), free products. I'm currently using Dropbox (lol) as a backup but I'm worried about sharing the direct DL link since bad actors can create stuff pretty easily in Python with multithreading that would trigger the daily transfer threshold almost instantly, obscuring the URL would at least necessitate a traffic-monitoring tool which should rule out a lot of novice "hackers"
Lightsail seems to offer everything I need for the first point, at only $3.50 USD a month, compared to something like GoDaddy which is ~$20 for an equivalent service, I'm just unsure if the 20GB of storage and .5tb of file transfers only covers website-data, not actual file transfers
I'd also love to hear any horror-stories from past users if anyone has them, or alternative web-hosting solutions that don't cost half a shopify plan
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@iamlamprey when you say free, you don't mean freely available, right? Because there are plenty of options for that. So what's the angle, getting leads?
Otherwise if you don't need a dynamic website, host it on github pages.
What kind of functionality does your website need? User areas? User registration? Or just "sign up to mailing list with email and get a download link"?
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@aaronventure said in Amazon Lightsail for Hosting:
@iamlamprey when you say free, you don't mean freely available, right? Because there are plenty of options for that. So what's the angle, getting leads?
I mean completely free with no signup or anything. A clickable button on the webpage that starts a file download for the instrument(s), this is why i need to be careful about transfer limits
Otherwise if you don't need a dynamic website, host it on github pages.
I'll look into github pages, but I also plan on having other stuff on the website, music, merch etc, it's going to be a central hub for all my stuff
What kind of functionality does your website need? User areas? User registration? Or just "sign up to mailing list with email and get a download link"?
None of these will be required to download the instruments, I'll probably have an optional mailing list. I'm basically going the Analogobsession route with Patreon
Thanks for taking the time!
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@iamlamprey said in Amazon Lightsail for Hosting:
mean completely free with no signup or anything. A clickable button on the webpage that starts a file download for the instrument(s), this is why i need to be careful about transfer limits
Then I believe you can host them on github. Upload yours dlls to a repo or pages and link to the raw link for instant download.
There is no traffic limit. Rate limit is something crazy like 5000 calls per file per hour per ip so there is no way you would ever hit that (in case of dialed download or multiple machines, your users would only do under 10)
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@aaronventure yeh been reading about github pages for the past 20 minutes, looks like it has everything I need for my setup, thanks so much for this gem!
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Okay quick followup here after some testing in case anyone else wants to do something similar:
First of all, Github deprecated the Theme Selector and haven't updated the main page for it in over a year, so I'm not going to bother using Jekyll, Wordpress it is.
- Design website locally in Wordpress, im using imgur for image hosting (for now)
- Use the free Simply Static plugin to export a static version of the website
- Put those files in a repo with Github Pages setup
3.5 Optionally connect your custom Domain - Build/Deploy and you're done
Fast, responsive website hosting for free with the familarity of Wordpress.
Note that this only works for static websites, if you're doing WooCommerce stuff I don't think it will play nice, for simple file-hosting it's great
Thanks again @aaronventure
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@iamlamprey glad that worked out for you!
