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.