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Ask HN: Where do you host your Go apps

6 points asim | 1 comments | 30 Jun 25 11:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.283s | source

Simple question. Where and how do you host your Go apps? I feel like either you have to run a VM or pay for the complexity of a Google cloud.

I'm sure some people will now say things like Fly or Railway but curious to know firsthand.

Personally I'm still using DigitalOcean, I git pull, compile from source and run the Go binary, occassionally with a shell script. It's fronted by nginx and certbot/letsencrypt. That's it. For some reason I wish this was some simple solution instead of the endless variety of hosting out there. I always worry about Fly, Railway or someone else going out of business. I find other tools really complicated, and dedicated app hosting too expensive. A VM plus some open source works well. But I guess when you offloading that hosting to someone else you start expecting all sorts of tools. Maybe if there was just a dedicated CLI based thing. Who knows.

1. st3fan ◴[30 Jun 25 12:23 UTC] No.44422397[source]▶
Invest in CI/CD. If your project is on GitHub, create a workflow that builds your app and packages it as a docker image stored in your private GitHub Container Registry.

On your server you can then just docker pull a new version. You can also automate this on the server side with a cron job or use Podman which can automatically detect new versions and will pull and run your image.

Bit more work to set it up but then all your manual steps go away. Having a docker container image also means you can deploy it anywhere - most places where you host apps accept an image as the universal format for an app.