Best way to deploy a small rails app on a tight budget?

Question

I want to play around with deploying a very small rails application.

It's for personal use, so there will be very low traffic and the app itself is just a newly generated rails 4 project with a sqlite db at the moment.

Currently I have a free AWS instance, a github account with the rails project and a domain.

My plan is to follow the amazon guide here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create_deploy_Ruby_rails.html

Is this doable on a free instance or will I need to spend cash on hosting / platform provider?

Ideally I would like to do this for free, or as close to as possible.

Is there a better or easier way to do this?

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

The AWS Free Tier only lasts a year. After that you have to pay and it is not very cheap.

You could try out Heroku . Running a simple app is free on Heroku. Perfect for your own hobby projects, can be upscaled when it starts to get real.

Answer 2

I recently tried to find the same thing for a blog. I found that I didn't qualify for the free instance for AWS because I signed up to S3 years ago. But that heroku has free development boxes.

Basically, you can get this for free:

• a host
• a small database

But you can't get this for free:

• background processing
• permanent up time

The up time thing is the biggest problem for me. Basically if you don't have someone visiting your site regularly, heroku shut it down to re-distribute the cpu cycles. It will start up again if you visit the site, but it does take 20-30 seconds.

If you want permanent up time, you need to buy a second dyno which will cost $35 a month ish.