#Any free-tier solutions for heavy read-write personal project?

22 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

thorny mantle
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Greetings readers,
I need some wisdom from all of your experienced and enthusiastic devs on one web project I want to make as a hobby and for personal use.
[Note:

  • I am not a web developer, also I don't know much about the backend but I'll learn that through this project.
  • I am not looking for advice related to how I should implement the project code/architecture-wise, as I want to figure out that fun part myself.
    ]

Some context:

  • I want to create a web app for reading books and research papers that are present as pdfs on my GitHub repo.
  • I want to create the web app in a way that can maintain all the user history, like last page user left reading and the pages that user has read(in case user jumps to some arbitrary page of the file)
  • I want the above info to be recorded even if the site is closed or the browser is closed(I assume I need to write at every page visit)
  • I want to maintain tags to group the files as well.
  • Allow users to add their books and other docs.

Basically, I want to create a library app on the web and maintain the data for now.

Now the thing is, I don't want to invest money in this and don't want to pay for deployment and hosting costs and DB maintaining costs.
Are there any reasonable solutions in the market that have some free tiers good enough to let me achieve this?
I am planning to only use the project myself or share it with <10-20 friends.

Please let me know if you folks are aware of some good solutions for this, thank you 🙂

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Any free-tier solutions for heavy read-write personal project?

wicked rover
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you are asking an architecture question here

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but you explicitly say that you dont want an answer to architechture

bold sparrow
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I feel like the free tier is to host it all yourself?

thorny mantle
thorny mantle
rain roost
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If it’s going to be for <20 users, using SQLite will probably make your life easier

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The DB requirements don’t seem that heavy, even if the pdfs turn out to be data intensive

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See if you can have GitHub pages serve the pdf data, but then self-host the application itself? How does that sound?

thorny mantle
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Isn't SQLite a local database? I just want services that will keep my website up and running without me.
Surely github pages sounds okay for static sites but that will not solve backend and db issues, right?

rain roost
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github pages was just an idea to reduce bandwidth if you hosted it from home. not much use if the app is hosted externally. yeah, sqlite just saves the data with your app, wherever you decide to host it

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so, for example, if you grab a VPS, then you can have the app source code and the sqlite database just like in a folder

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were you aiming to throw this on a VPS, or were you hoping to throw it in some lambda-like thing where there's no OS maintenance?

wicked rover
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you could use github pages as a cdn and then host the actual server on something like glitch

thorny mantle
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No, I don't want to involve hosting using my own physical server, its just a project for learning purposes

wicked rover
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your own physical server is great for learning purposes actually

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since you can tinker with it

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could get a BananaPi

elfin turret
thorny mantle