How can I host a small api/database accessable from a phone app as cheap/easily as possible?
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Well it's also a learning project as through a series of events I am technically a software developer in job title who got thrown into a c# code base with databases after doing a python boot camp for 9 weeks and have no mentor to tell me what I'm doing wrong on professional projects.
Ah - I get that. You have my sympathies.
A personal project like that would be a great way to train/get experience then. But do realize that it becomes a lot more complicated once you have people other than yourself relying on your application. Suddenly up-time becomes a lot very important and up-time is hard. End-users, even friendly ones, get very frustrated when you say "try now please" a lot. They'll just stop using it.
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
Why not Home Assistant?
You can log seizures via buttons on the UI (web or mobile app), or via an NFC tag, have counters and stats.
Counters can also be used for medication tracking. More advanced solution exist via custom integrations, e.g this. -
So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
A VPS on Hetzner with 2 shared vCPUs, 4GB ram and 40GB storage costs me less than €5 per month. I use it for services that are more "critical" compared to what runs on my home server.
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Google Sheets will be a simple solution you can do for free.
The app "Track & Graph" is another.
I have been logging all my medical events using Tasker and a Google Calendar. Analysis is manual using graphviz.
This is c/selfhosted
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
Maybe use a filesystem and syncthing this way? https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync
Or you could use the free tier of some PaaS like
https://render.com/docs/free if you prefer a traditional approach -
So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
I’m using a free web host plan from freehostia (chocolate plan), an SQLite database and a single php file from the github repo below to provide me api access to my database tables. I previously used the web hosts MySQL database.
Create some QR codes or NFC tags for specific medication/seizure events to make logging easy. For visibility you can create some reports and you’ve got yourself a solution.
I use this setup to manage and log my backup tape rotations at work.
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I didn't know they had free tiers... I'll look into it
I've read very bad experiences about Oracle free tier VPS, like VPS disappeared for good with all the data.
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Do you need a web app, or would a mobile app do? There are a number of medication trackers and one specifically for tracking stuff like this called Track & Graph. The DB export is a SQLite DB, which can be SyncThing'ed to a computer and worked with with whatever rolls you like.
This is what I was thinking.
Syncthing will be the quickest to set up.
There's a potential for collisions but that would likely be manageable.
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
You can get a VPS on Vultr for $5 a month that’ll be plenty for your use case. For security look into mTLS. Web servers like Caddy support it pretty easy. You put a certificate on you and your wife’s phones and only you will be able to connect to your endpoint.
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This is c/selfhosted
The boundary of where to host what, is not fixed. You cannot host the internet at home. Where people sit on the spectrum varies depending on skill, resources and need.
I highlighted several options that provide a solution for someone with limited skills and resources.
You could host a CALDAV server or a next cloud at home and use the suggestions I provided, or you could use those hosted by someone else.
My answer was to provide ideas, not a how-to guide, answering, in my opinion, exactly what OP was looking for.
That it doesn't match your idea about solving the problem tells you that there are many ways to solve software problems. My suggestions had a low barrier to entry.
What's your recommendation for OP?
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
I'm not sure of the availability guarantees, but Oracle and other cloud services have free tiers for low CPU/RAM/storage needs. If the availability guarantees are there, this could be an option. It works fine for FoundryVTT and hasn't cost me anything for the last couple years, and I don't imagine your projected needs would outstrip Foundry's.
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
You can drploy a Cloudflare worker that exposes an APi endpoint with an SQLite DB completely for free and without doing any maintenance. I don’t think the DB is encrypted , so it wouldn’t be my first choice if privacy is a concern. There’s a bit of a learning curve with all the UI bloat but once you figured it out it’s a very hassle free solution.
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
I've used airtable for these sorts of "personal use" use cases (eg: home built rocketry flight log) and I was even able to use their iPhone / Android app to enter data.
I haven't paid a cent for it yet as I'm well under their data caps.
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So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
I have a very similar situation: a cat with a severe kidney disability, meds 5 times a day with at least 2h between each. We've been using a whiteboard but I am currently setting a smarter solution. My WIP setup is a raspberry pi with a static IP on my local network and a FastAPI app. This way I can also do a household to-do lists (did anybody watered plants recently?) and add connection to local smart lights (effects if meds could not be given with 2h interval before our usual go-to-bed time), etc.
It would only work for us since it is a household only solution. Our cats do not travel anywhere and I do not currently need to check for these todos when not at home. It may be different for you. Good luck OP, hope you will find something that suits you.
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Why not Home Assistant?
You can log seizures via buttons on the UI (web or mobile app), or via an NFC tag, have counters and stats.
Counters can also be used for medication tracking. More advanced solution exist via custom integrations, e.g this.Wow, that does seem really useful! So clever to use Home Assistant, and nfc tags. Plus, it's plain csv when you need the data.
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