I'm building a personal application and want to make it publicly accessible so four or five friends can test it. I'm mainly looking for the lowest-cost setup.
The project uses Turborepo with a monorepo structure:
- An API backed by MySQL
- A React/TypeScript frontend
- Several packages and scripts for cron jobs and fetching third-party data
- Docker containers
I looked at Vercel, but I wasn't sure how well it supports this setup. I also explored AWS, but I reached a step that appeared to require buying a domain. What hosting approach would you recommend for a small test deployment, and do I even need to purchase a domain?
4 Answers
For a temporary project with only a few users, you may not need paid hosting at all. Run the Docker containers on your own computer and expose the application through a free Cloudflare Tunnel or a similar tunneling service. You’ll need to keep your machine running, and you should secure the database and application properly, but this can be the cheapest option.
You don’t generally need to buy a domain to deploy on AWS or other hosting platforms. Most services provide a temporary public hostname or IP address. A domain is only necessary if you want a custom, memorable address. For a small project, a basic virtual machine or container service is enough; avoid adding managed services you don’t need because they can increase the cost.
I think I followed a setup path that assumed I wanted a custom domain. I’ll check the simpler virtual machine options.
A small VPS is probably the simplest reliable solution. Providers such as DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr offer inexpensive entry-level servers where you can run Docker Compose, MySQL, the API, the frontend, and scheduled jobs together. You can deploy the monorepo as containers and use a reverse proxy for routing.
Turborepo also has support for creating optimized Docker builds, which can help keep the deployment smaller and faster.
A platform-as-a-service provider such as Render can be easier than managing a VPS. You can deploy the frontend and API from the monorepo and connect a hosted database, although the free or lowest-cost tiers may sleep, have resource limits, or charge separately for the database. For a short-lived demo, that convenience may be worth more than running everything yourself.
That sounds useful for testing. I’ll look into using a tunnel instead of exposing my home network directly.