Bubble & CloudFlare... Slowly catching up

For me, understanding hosting has been one of the hardest aspects of evaluating Wappler. From a business owner’s perspective, in particular, it seems hard to get my head around how much hosting is going to cost, which has been a roadblock to me migrating to Wappler.

The integration with Docker seems really cool! I feel like I’m just now starting to understand what docker is and the benefits it can add but this also creates more confusion over hosting. It appears that we need to find special hosting if we want to use Docker. However, hosting expenses seem to vary depending on time on the server instead of a flat fee, which is confusing.

Here are some questions that I have been spending a lot of time investigating BEFORE I start the 7 day trial on Wappler:

  • Where do I host it? Which providers? Hostgator (current hosting), Heroku, AWS EC2 w/Beanstalk?
  • What’s the difference between standard hosting and Docker hosting?
  • Do I need to manage a server?
  • How do I budget for hosting expenses? What factors affect pricing? Time? Speed?
  • I need a SSL certificate since I have a .app domain. Where do I get that? How much will it cost?
  • What developer tools should I be using and how do they work? Code editor? Database creator? Git? Github?

Wappler is considerably more expensive than what I currently pay at Bubble: $65 USD compared to $16 USD monthly. But even more important, I don’t even know what to expect for hosting expenses, which scares me. It seems like a Wappler setup with our own hosting is a much better long-term strategy, it’s just that there are some pretty big financial unknowns.

Also, statements like “It’s easy”, “that’s not part of Wappler”, “It’s industry standard” don’t help the cause for business owners looking to quickly make a business decision about switching to Wappler. I get that most of the people on this forum are developers and you probably find these basic questions annoying, but even just a little bit of help bridging the gap from technologist to business owner would be extremely helpful. I’m not ragging on anyone, just trying to give helpful feedback that will hopefully increase the adoption of Wappler.

I am thankful to @JonL who is going through the migration process (Bubble-> Wappler) and taking us along for the ride and so much more could be done similar to his efforts.

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Which one do you use? What do you like about them? What don’t you like about them?

I actually don’t understand where Cloudflare fits into the big picture of all the providers/tools we would need to use along with Wappler.

https://www.cloudways.com/ is quite a popular option for managed hosting. I haven’t used them as I feel comfortable fiddling with the infrastructure side but I have heard good things about them.

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I’ve used ServerPilot before. So easy to connect to a VPS. MySQL database and SSL certificate on one click.

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I created a poll: How many Bubble users (past or present) are here?

Hosting is just few dollars per month - nothing special. See:

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I’ve used quite a few hosting companies in the past, but I’ve only used one for the past 14 years - www.clook.net. I suppose the most important thing is that their service is very reliable and they offer excellent support. Most months this year uptime has been 100%; the worst month was 99.94%. Average response times have been between 126 - 193ms. They reply to support email pretty much straightaway, at any time of day.

I don’t think there is anything I don’t like about them, though I’m sure there are cheaper options available - but peace of mind is worth a lot.

They’re probably not particularly well-known as they’re a fairly small company, and based in the UK.

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We host around a dozen dedicated servers with Fasthosts in the UK (and in the past we run an entire game service provider there with over 60 dedicated servers before we moved to co-location, even then their engineers helped us out). Always been amazing service for going on twenty years… Had the same account Manager for several of those who has been amazing. Services start relatively cheap with shared hosting with SSL and MYSQL starting below €5.00 a month, based upon CPanel (very easy to use and configure). Support is fantastic with live chat and constant updates. We had some difficult migrations a few years back and they nailed it with no down-time what so ever. Very happy with their services.

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Hey everyone…

I’m going to move a big app over from Bubble… and I’m loving this thread!

So with hosting… I want something which gives me flexibility and control over:

a) security

b) elasticity - not slowing things down when there is a lot of activity in my app at the same time (as Bubble does).

c) price

I’m a hosting newbie so I don’t yet understand all the possibilities in these areas, let alone who to choose as my hosting company.

I’ve been thinking AWS will give me all I desire…

… but would love to hear people’s experiences!

Best wishes,
Antony.

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Have a look at https://wapplerhosting.com, fully scaleable cloud servers at a great price

How big are we talking and what specific needs does your app have?

Daily and monthly views.
Max concurrent users to website during peak hours.
Max concurrent users writing to database.
Disk space needs.
Bandwidth needs.
Video on server aka streaming.
Uptime requirements.
Main location of your users.
Data privacy requirements.

Hi Everyone!

I’m also coming over from Bubble and am wondering about migrating my database in bubble to somewhere else. Has anyone migrated a (rather large and intricate) database from bubble yet? If so, what was that like? It’s nice to see so many Bubblers here!

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Hey Kimberly…Welcome!

First off, you won’t have any trouble importing into your Wappler db as that is standard sql stuff whereas the reverse (going into Bubble) is extremely slow.

Next, you won’t have access to the password so you’ll need a process to have that re-established user by user.

You’re likely going to just export each table from Bubble and then import CSV into your sql db. You’ll have to map the fields and for single value fields that will be straightforward. Bubble however has the concepts of Lists of Values, which will show up as a comma separated list of Unique ID’s or values in your csv’s. Those map back to other tables, so you will have to setup those relationships and get them pointed back to their parent. Perhaps you’ll want to import (for all tables) the Bubble unique id, and store that in addition to a typical sql id auto-increment field. Then you can use those unique id’s to maintain the relationship’s. I wouldn’t use that going forward, but it will help get the data into place.

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Wow! This helps a whole lot. I’m ready to get started on this now! Thank you so much for such clear and thorough instructions!

An aside: Wappler and the standard frameworks are much easier to learn than bubble’s processes and logic.

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Especially responsiveness! I can’t tell you how much time I spent on getting my Bubble pages to be responsive. With Bootstrap 4 and the grid system it’s almost completely responsive by default!

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Absolutely. The responsiveness is the WORST. I would just add workflows and general logic to all of that as well. I just think they over-engineered a lot of things, unnecessarily. Some things make absolutely no sense and most things are so slow I could cry. The limitations are absolutely insane for something that takes as much time (actually, more) to learn as the standards do, especially since getting anything to work requires our own over-engineering. All of that for something that isn’t even reliable.

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Hey @dserber… I was thinking responsive design may be so much easier over here.
So glad to hear your experience.
I just gave up with Bubble!

@TheForce… thank you for your words… such clarity on the Bubble challenges!

The over engineering I have had to do makes me want to cry… :frowning:

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Hi @Antony ,

AWS is overly complex to setup and manage for most. I would recommend Digital Ocean – the interface is easier to use, cheaper, and they have one-click Docker droplets if you decide to use it. If you use this link you will get a $50 credit for use in the 1st 30 days. https://m.do.co/c/1eca4d9f57b1.

Otherwise, almost anything is going to be faster than Bubble – they have managed to completely hobble performance.

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Just published a guide about the new docker and DigitalOcean integration in Wappler

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