Cheapest AWS solution would be just EC2 instances (=basic virtual machines). t3a.nano instances cost just $3.5/mo and do not require additional load-balancers.
The modern cloudy approach would be to look into stuff like CloudFlare Workers, iirc they can run WASM, so if you manage to compile your code to that then it might work.
Otherwise, why not just get a cheap VPS and host the binary there? I’ve used Vultr and it’s $3.50/month all-in, at the low end. There are even cheaper providers, although I don’t know about their quality. I bet this option would be the cheapest.
This is the beauty of a single binary—it’s trivial to deploy!
this is the question driving the framework I'm building—it even has support for simple HTML templates, but they're interpreted, type-checked against the structs that get passed into them, and baked into the executable, all at compile time. this is all coming off of building a website for a client using PHP for the first time in over a decade—on one hand, I appreciate the relative simplicity and ease of deployment compared to modern backend stacks, but on the other hand, it's still an interpreted language, with all the baggage associated with that. I believe it is possible to take the ease of use and speed of iteration of interpreted languages, and the benefits of strongly-typed compiled languages, and get the best of both worlds—at least, for the scale and complexity of website that I want to build and maintain.
Multiple websites served by golang written server, some static sites, also gitea and Jenkins.
The web app is fronted cloudflare (free tier). On the box itself I have caddy set up as a reverse proxy with the cloudflare cert, then uvicorn serving my python asgi (starlette) app. The app uses a local SQLite db.
I’m still working out some of the operational stuff like backups and monitoring but so far I am very pleased with the setup. I’m learning a lot and for the first time I do not feel like there is some monstrous pile of complexity behind a curtain.
Setup takes some time but I have detailed notes and it gets easier every time I run through. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to hear more details.
what are the best options out there for hosting websites built as HTTP-serving executables (either Windows or Linux)? is it possible to do this relatively cheaply?
I ask because I've been working on a framework[0] for building websites in a compiled language recently, and while it's been a ton of fun to build and test locally as a hobby project, I have absolutely no idea if it's even remotely financially viable to host a (small- to medium-sized) website made this way, compared to all of the managed hosting solutions out there for PHP/Node/etc.
I don't want/need to pay for a whole dedicated server—I just want to serve HTTP (eventually HTTPS) from a single executable, using one or more SQLite database files. ideally, it would cost as close to your typical shared PHP host as possible.
I have almost zero experience with "cloud" hosting—I made a small game with Node on Azure years ago, and accidentally racked up charges just playing around with it in development—so I don't know if this, or AWS, or whatever else is a viable solution for this. I've seen that it is indeed possible to host a single executable on Azure, but I haven't actually tried it myself, or determined what the pricing for this would end up being.
[0] https://github.com/rezich/Newf