Every single one! The cloud is a trap.
Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
201–210 of 236 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#202“Self-host” is such a weird word. Having your own stuff yourself should be the default , should it not? I mean, you don’t “self-drive” your car, nor “self-work” your job. The corresponding words instead exists for the opposites: You can have a chauffeur and you can outsource your job. I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can’t then…
> "Having your own stuff yourself should be the default, should it not?"
I don't think it has anything to do with internet speeds. Self-hosting is simply too complicated, not just for non-technical users, but for many developers too.
Compare the simplicity of installing a desktop app. Click to start the installer. Click next, next...finish. Done.
Self-hosting in the cloud is ludicrously complicated in comparison. Docker, Sandstorm, Cloudron, your command line script - these are neither simple or easy. (A developer's definition of 'simple' and 'easy' bears no relation to the real definitions of these words).
It's also one of the reasons why SaaS, for better or worse, is eating the software B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) markets. In comparison, the self-hosting market for web apps is negligible.
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#203Yes. We used Mysql setups, Percona Xtradb cluster and Clickhouse servers and it's ok to run it by myself cuz we work on bare metal servers.
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
And every thing you have control over you are also responsible for maintaining. If that's your thing, ok, but not everyone wants to be a DBA all day.
self hosting a now 300gb database using mariadb, been in production for 14 years with almost no downtime and very good performance. i do not DBA all day, i do it maybe once a year to do a version upgrade. this perception of having to be special or only focus on sysadmin stuff for self hosting is incredible. cloud providers have managed diamond cartel levels of consumer propaganda in the tech sphere, its pretty amazin…
It's not perception, it's empirical evidence. Every thing I've set up myself is another thing I'm responsible for maintaining. Each and every one of them generates some baseline of stress, because there's only so many things I can juggle in my head at once. I'm relieved when a concentrated economic effort allows me to throw money at something I'd rather replace with doing something else, something I like doing.
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#205Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#206Interestingly, there are two stages of any project when self-hosting is way more efficient.
First is an MVP stage, when you do it on a single VPS for $5/month + $1 for backups.
Second is multifold scaling stage, when you rent or even buy a couple of cabinets of bare metal hardware.
BTW, AWS Postgres does not support master-master replication, which makes no-downtime migration pretty hard. Just remember about those small quirks making vendor lock stronger.
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still unclear on if the VM here is on a machine they own/on their own premises? Or is it under someone else's control? "In the cloud" sounded like the latter but it sounds like the intention was the former?
They are talking about renting a VM from a cloud provider and setting up the DB themselves (example: EC2) vs renting a fully managed DB from a cloud service provider (example: RDS).
But if you're running on a VM from a cloud provider isn't your data still in the hands of a third party..??
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be fascinated to hear more about this. Where do the SQLite files live? Are you using some kind of NFS or EFS or similar for them? Sharding them across many machines? How are you handling backups and high availability? Are you using Litestream? How many SQLite files do your application servers have open at any one time?
SQLite mentions NFS as problematic because SQLite makes a lot of use of advisory locking. Which is supposed to work on NFS, but apparently is often buggy.
Writing to a SQLite file on a remote filesystem only works with a heap of caveats: don't use WAL, and disable SHM.
SQLite is crazy fast in WAL mode, but it's because they use a memory-mapped file to coordinate consistency across multiple processes/threads. You can't mmap a remote file.
(Source: hacking in a DB replica workaround to PhotoStructure so people can store their library on arbitrary filesystems... BTW, I'd love to be wrong here: if someone's figured out how to do this, please share!)
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#209This decision is easy: if you or your team is comfortable caring and feeding the DB and know how to harden and monitor the thing, save the money.
If y'all don't want to be on pager duty, though, pay someone else to manage it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And receiving a call and telling: "here's datacenter emergency phone, please ping them" or forwarding mail to datacenter team with "can you give ETA to the business" is an order of magnitude easier than trying to concentrate and resolve the actual problem while being interrupted every 5 minutes and not having required level of access to actually do it, even if the knowledge exists. You seem to have exceptional cust…
That's a valid point, looks like we are not in the same role. I work mostly on internal software in a big "enterprise". My customers are mostly internal customers (marketing, sales, ...) but I have a luxury of having a business analyst, project manager or product owner that receive calls from them, so I don't need to explain anything directly to customers. In rare cases that some C-level break through and complain di…
Reason why I transfer from BA to data :P