My business that I’m building relies upon having a solid option for hosting for websites. So far, this has largely worked out okay only because I’ve had clients who don’t expect high availability and don’t need more than a static website, so I have hosted them on either Codeberg Pages or Neocities depending on client request. When it comes to big cloud providers, I find that Object Storage (such as AWS S3) is essential for minimizing costs. As much as I prefer either using a small independent webhost like Codeberg Pages or Neocities, or alternatively just hosting at home on an old computer or a pi, some clients will expect high availability which I can’t guarantee when using any of those options, so I’m looking around for a cloud hosting provider which supports Object Storage and ideally OpenTofu as well since I like using it for reproducibility. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to drop them in the replies below!
Are these still static sites? Because then you could guarantee this just by putting a properly configured CDN in front of them.
Alternatively, you can DIY redundant object storage on any servers with Garage: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
Ideally you’d do both and have say, 3 Garage servers in different datacenters hosting all your data redundantly, plus a CDN like Bunny.net in front of them.
Otherwise, I don’t have much advice for managed providers who will run object storage for you unfortunately, but maybe someone else will.
To add on to the DIY approach.
I have found if you’re going to take this route, there are new open hyperconverged (just means it has VMs, containers, Kubernetes, storage, network, and a few other core cloud services together) cloud framework. My favorite is Harvester by the Suse team who also manage Rancher, k3s, and Longhorn (distributed block storage for apps not to be confused with object storage).
There’s also ProxMox and Xen’s XCP-ng who have really solid hypervisor only options (container support is meh) so I prefer to just use the Hypervisor and do Kubernetes with Talos or finally, you can just have multiple bare metal installations of Talos, k3s, or RKE2 Kubernetes flavors.
My friends and I are developing a community similar to PG that will have a knowledge repo and some standardized open tofu scripts to provision everything from the VMs and other software. We’re not trying to build our own open solution, but rather an “off-the-open-shelf" stack and knowledge base to lower the cost of developing these infrastructures in a standardized way so that it’s easier to troubleshoot. We want to enable different architectures and collectively test and deploy these anywhere from a medium to large server in your house, to a local community managed cloud.
But for now, I would check out Harvester if you need a solution today. It will be a while until we have a foundation for a community to work from.
I also second this option for object storage, which can be installed via Kubernetes once you make the k8s endpoint available.
I would also suggest keeping an eye on RustFS. Its a very young and moving fast so likely there are issues. Once there is significant adoption I will likely prefer this as it mirrors the features to directly compete with MinIO (they did a bit of a bait and switch on their licensing).
There’s also SeaweedFS, which is highly customizable, but recovery and maintenance look like a PITA if you’re just wanting to offer HA as a contractor.
Storj is also an interesting one to consider using, though I don’t know details on any issues folks have had. To me it could be an ideal backup for block storage and any object storage files you want backed up.