I thought this was interesting to share. I live in Sydney, Australia, and I was looking for relatively easy hosting setup for an Australian audience. I had two options: go with a platform-as-a-service provider like Heroku, or spend more time setting up my own infrastructure with AWS which has a datacentre in Sydney. Azure isn’t available here yet, but it’s coming real soon now(tm).
Both Heroku and AWS offer free tiers, so I didn’t need to shell out any money. I’ve used AWS before, so I figured I’d give Heroku a try.
Heroku
I won’t cover the pros/cons of Heroku as lots of people have already done it, but deploying my first app was really smooth and easy. At the time of writing you can only host in the US (EU is in beta), so I went with the default US option.
When you deploy, your app runs on a unit called a dyno, which is heroku’s equivalent of a server, and your hosting dyno will sleep after an hour of inactivity if you’re on a free tier. I noticed a lag on page load occasionally when the dyno was waking up, so I threw it in web page test to measure*.
It takes 9 seconds for the user to see anything meaningful on the screen. Ouch.
Amazon Web Services
I decided to try Amazon using their platform-as-a-service, Elastic Beanstalk. You do share underlying architecture when you’re on the free tier, but there’s no concept of your machine ‘sleeping’ like the dyno does.
Once I got the deployment working, it was noticeably faster than Heroku for a cold start. Time to start rendering is much faster at just under 2 seconds (and reducing that time is my problem now, not the hosting). Here are the comparison graphs.
There is a downside, though – hosting with Amazon takes a lot more persistence because their documentation kinda sucks. It’s huge and contradicts itself in different articles, so you aren’t quite of the right thing to do. I followed these instructions to deploy a node.js app and ran into three different issues, one of which was because I’m trying to deploy region which isn’t the default US-East. If I wasn’t already familiar with AWS, I might have given up.
* Technically, I didn’t test from Australia – I used the Wellington, NZ agent in case the Sydney agents were hosted in an Amazon data centre.
coding, cake and travel 
https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/dokku-tutorial-digital-ocean
You could get something in between with this kind of setup?
I don’t actually need it, Elastic Beanstalk is working just fine now – I have push deployment from git, fast response times, and it’s free since it’s my first account. I actually prefer having more access to the logs and configuration than you get through Heroku, and it’s just as easy to deploy as Heroku.
I might check out Dokku & Digital Ocean for future usage though, so thanks for pointing it out. The cost for a dedicated micro instance in AWS is at least $15 a month, and Digital Ocean’s cheapest tier is $5!