You get edge computing, autoscaling, and load balancing without additional configuration.

Not as flexible as AWS, but also much easier to setup and maintain.

But the reliability issues suck now and then.

Today, Fly.io is more or less in the same market as Lightsail, not AWS. And when you compare it to Lightsail, it blows it away.

This is a bit of a confusing sentence because there are so many pronouns. Do all of the "it"s refer to Fly.io?

For $5 you get:

Latest gen CPUs and RAM

HTTPS

DDoS protection

Cloudflare CDN

Autoscale

Competent support

I'd say the best part is the predictable monthly prices

And while most people probably don't care, they are an established public company, so there is more chance they will exist in 10 years

also, my experience with support was not the same as yours. they were utterly useless for the most part.

for a personal web dev (or similar) project, like, i agree, they’ve got good value.

but having worked in a small biz where DO was what they built everything on — no. bad idea. spend more. use aws (graviton ec2 instances)/azure.

but GO and pocketbase is on record for supporting 10k concurrent requests per second on low powered VPS

Additionally, having machines that turn off when not in use is easy to configure, which I never managed on AWS.

I haven't looked at it recently, but App Runner could do a few of Fly.io esque things (but slightly more expensive): https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/

5G towers are a ton of compute on the edge to secure and protect the traffic passing through them.

Or if by edge you mean having stuff close to your consumers, every non trivial operation does that.

And no not every nontrivial operation does it to the extreme of an envisioned fly.io deployment.

There is a lot of things we do for our users that we don't need (no one "needs" SPA etc). But if it is easy to make your app faster for your users, why not?

In a world where much web browsing starts with ACK SYN ACK, it is nice if the server is close to you.

For dynamic data I use SWR.

I could use Cloudflare workers but it doesn’t play so nice with Astro.

I also have a “form submission service” where I receive a Post and send an email.

I need maximum uptime to avoid revenue loss.

It’s a go service so I deploy ~6 machines across the US to ensure I don’t drop any requests.

I haven’t had downtime in years.

*Note this is for an instance with only 256MB RAM (https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/), but it's definitely possible to run non-trivial projects on that. Rust-based web servers like Rocket require only about 10MB RAM. Basic PHP servers should also fit from what I can find.

Fly is mostly (to my knowledge) reselling Netactuate and OVH servers, their main innovation is the developer experience on top, using Docker on a MicroVM based approach. Of course not only that, but I think it’s their main differentiator.

Haven’t used that in a while but Scaleway offered ridiculously cheap dedicated ARM hardware close to these price points, not sure if they still do.

(Not saying the typical cheap VPS on LowEndTalk has comparable PaaS features. Only responding to parent’s use case of a single cheap instance.)

You can easily get 4 GB of RAM for $5 from the likes of Hetzner or Hostinger, so that's 16x more RAM for 2.5x the price. One relatively unknown provider I have used in the past offers 2 GB of RAM for €3.6/month (if paid monthly, €3 if anually), so 8x more RAM for 1.5-2x the price. I'm sure I could find something even cheaper, but I'm just looking at providers I have personally used.

BTW that dropdown seems to be sorted cheapest > most expensive. If you go to the bottom of the list the price for that same VPS doubles.

There's definitely places that offer it... also 512m

I know because I've personally bought such plans and that was $5-10/yr because I didn't need dedicated ipv4.

One of my VMs had an uptime of more than 1050 days before the infrastructure rebooted it, so in terms of availability they've certainly surprised me.

The only downside I've come across with Oracle Free is that the 'best' regions are typically full. I ended up provisioning my free VMs in another region/country and it works fine.

I suppose another downside (if you want to view it this way) is they will delete idle unused free VMs after a certain time period. You have to add a credit card to your account to "upgrade" your account and run free resource indefinitely. While you're not charged for anything, it makes me nervous forking over a CC number to Oracle.

Just get a $5/mo VPS instead if you're really concerned about a few dollars a month.

The perverse irony is that the most common reason cited by cloud providers for not letting people set a hard cap on charges is an insistence that surely the last thing you want in the world is for your service to be taken offline, even if it does means avoiding a $1k–$100k bill at the end of the month.

if you are going to haggle over $2/month then you are better off just connecting your raspberry pi with wireguard/cloudflare tunnel on a residential connection

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296

I had to leave a few months ago after the price raises and how many times my boss saw some issue in the project I had with them.

They also deprecated and removed their sqlite backup service. Back to GCP and not worrying about so many outages now.

But in all seriousness the gall to raise prices before actually fixing the reliability problems is pretty shocking. I understand it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing where you maybe are tight on resources but there's no scenario where it's acceptable to have a product with these kinds of problems and then raise prices on existing customers who are putting up with it.

expect to see more of these "post-mortem apologies" from fly.io in the future because it won't be the last

in fact, you can almost get the same thing fly.io does by running firecracker on your own bare metal servers and cheaper too.

I'm afraid the public sentiment towards fly.io has been tainted for good (I can't count how many times they apologized now).

Gotcha. I'll be sure to pass on the good word.

If it helps: all sorts of things can and do go wrong, but the most likely form of disruption you're likely to see here are periods of times when deployments don't work. This outage was a deployments/orchestration outage. We had a total request routing outage several months back, owing to a Rust concurrency landmine we stepped on, but those are very rare.

(Deployment and state-update outages are a big deal, and if you deploy to diverse groups of Fly Machines constantly, as we encourage you to do, that being one of the big features of the platform, they can impact your availability. I'm not downplaying them.)