Ask HN: What infrastructure would you use to host an open, free JSON-based API?

12 pointsglenscott17y ago10 comments

10 comments

Google App Engine is great & free for low volumes of traffic. I use it for my crypto dashboard: https://priceeth.github.io/

Github pages if it's static enough, or for any static part.

If the amount of data is small / static-ish, and can/needs to be changed by non-tech people, I've also used Google spreadsheet. Example: https://hasgluten.com

nreece7y ago

FaaS/Serverless will be a good starting point for something like this, so either AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions will be good enough.

kkoppenhaver7y ago

The free tier of AWS Lambda gives you up to 1 million calls per month. You could use this for the actual fulfillment of your data. Paired with AWS API Gateway (1 million calls for free per month for the first year), it seems that you could do this relatively cheaply.

The only thing I haven't accounted for here is if you're querying against some sort of database, which would incur additional hosting costs.

tony-allan7y ago

It would help if you have some additional context. Use case, volumes, cost objective...

mgliwka7y ago

What's the nature of your data? Is it static or dynamic?

asdkhadsj7y ago

^ important. If you're trying to provide free access, I always seek ways to mitigate cost. If the API can be slowly updating, like once a day or w/e, then I stick everything behind a static CDN or something such that it should cost you next to nothing. Just a small CPU somewhere to build the JSON endpoints per update cycle.

LiamPa7y ago

Django / Zappa

Which is basically AWS lambda / gateway with minimal setup and extremely cheap.

dpeck7y ago

In the odd case that the json is static hugo and s3 make for a painless deployment.

StriverGuy7y ago

Heroku is the easiest set up imo

slipwalker7y ago

given the limited amount of context, i would go with:

kotlin+jooby+jersey

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