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Ask HN: My friend and I cannot agree on our server side stack for our startup

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Re: Ask HN: My friend and I cannot agree on our server side stack for our startup

#13

Post by maybeok »

For the DB use postgres to save licensing costs. I would be more adamant about the DB decision than the language. It's nice to be able to deploy unlimited postgres DBs on as many servers as you need without breaking the bank.

In the future you may have ancillary services/apps better off using a separate DB for performance. DB licensing costs will influence your design decisions so remove those costs from the equation.

C# is fine though (even on linux) and will give you reasonable performance, likely better than node.js is most cases.

Re: Ask HN: My friend and I cannot agree on our server side stack for our startup

#14

Post by ac2u »

I'm assuming you're already past the stage where you've verified the problem you're solving is worth solving with technology, otherwise you're wasting time.

With that said, you need to divide responsibility. Either a 'CTO' role that has the decision to base the stack in his/her choice, or divide the tech up frontend/backend and give one person authority over each.

When it comes to tech decisions, look at what you can work on fastest, secondary considerations can then be things such as your immediately available hiring pool, and what would gel easier with those people, and finally things like licensing.

Re: Ask HN: My friend and I cannot agree on our server side stack for our startup

#17

Post by dagw »

lovelearning wrote: post #8

Perhaps evaluate the financial aspect of each stack, and compare. I suspect C# /.NET / MSSQL / Windows servers will be higher. In addition to server costs, someone has to pay for those software licenses too.

Microsoft gives startups free software licenses for the first 3 years and free/discounted access to Windows Servers on Azure. After 3 years you're almost certainly either making so much or so little money the extra license cost won't be a significant factor.

Re: Ask HN: My friend and I cannot agree on our server side stack for our startup

#18

Post by eswat »

I think you need to give one of you of the role of calling these shots and trust the other to make the right tech decisions so you don’t burn energy and time on trivialities like these.

As developers we think picking a tech stack is an immensely important decision for the foundation of your company. It isn’t. As developers you should be competent enough to pick up the slack and learn new tech as needed quickly, and leave the extra cycles to pick up things that you suck at but will need to figure out: customer services, business model, etc.

Echoing what other commenters have said, if you’re already running into problems about decision making then it’s likely to get worse. I also think you’re optimizing for developer happiness way too early.

Re: Ask HN: My friend and I cannot agree on our server side stack for our startup

#19

Post by GFischer »

maybeok wrote: post #13

For the DB use postgres to save licensing costs. I would be more adamant about the DB decision than the language. It's nice to be able to deploy unlimited postgres DBs on as many servers as you need without breaking the bank. In the future you may have ancillary services/apps better off using a separate DB for performance. DB licensing costs will influence your design decisions so remove those costs from the equation…

To be fair, they could apply to BizSpark and the licensing and hosting costs would be moot for 3 years (and it has lots of great benefits):

https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark

Btw, you can host Node.js apps on Azure if you like (I do), and a Linux stack if that's your thing, so it makes sense to apply to BizSpark even if you're not going the C# route.

Re: Ask HN: My friend and I cannot agree on our server side stack for our startup

#20

Post by GFischer »

debacle wrote: post #15

Don't use MS SQL server. It has serious issues with locking at scale that you can never get around. Apart from that, just make a choice and run with it.

At what kind of scale? I don't think any web application should have problems unless the queries are very badly designed.

I've worked with MS SQL for 10+ years (at financial institutions) with no problems. Oracle might be a tad better, but it's also pricier. No idea about Postgre (I've heard it's good), but what you mention shouldn't be a good reason to dismiss MS SQL.

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