Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I Built a Side Project

stayintech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 99 posts

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#51

Post by overcast »

elithrar wrote: post #48
overcast wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

> Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it. It's clear that the author was overspending—even a small dyno with a resource-hungry language like Rails can do a lot of traffic—but there's a lot more than just installing a web server, DB. Firewalls? WAL-E backups? Monitoring (of any kind)? A correct TLS setup? DB security? Setting those up—in a way that you can repli…

Sure, but most (all) virtual setups have automatic snapshots, and backups for a few bucks a month. The rest you mentioned, you SHOULD learn if you're getting your hands into web services. What happens when something goes wrong, who is fixing it if you have no idea how any of it is running? I guess I'm old school. You learn the basics first, and build upon it. It's not reinventing any wheel.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#52

Post by skorecky »

bpatrianakos wrote: post #47
mcone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.

I'd argue the barrier is just as high. I taught a ten week course in back end development and I think the students would have done equally well deploying on a VPS or Heroku. The curriculum called for using Heroku but I regret following it now. Heroku bills itself as being easy for a beginner but go ahead and try to deploy any simple Rails or Node project using their guides. Half the time something goes wrong. Either…

Many pet projects you can run for Free on Heroku. Their docs are pretty straight forward, not sure what your hiccups were but I've deployed quite a few sites to Heroku without much if any issues.

The asset pipeline in rails use to cause some issues but I think that has all been resolved with the 12 factor gem.

Also setting up a VPS is in no way easier than Heroku. You have to install nginx, ruby, mysql etc. Then you have to setup routing. Then you have to learn all sorts of sysadmin stuff so you don't get hacked. Setting firewall permissions, mysql permissions. Then you want to deploy that app. So you have to setup capistrano or whatever. Next thing you know day wasted.

Heroku?

    git push heroku master

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#53

Post by waffle_ss »

overcast wrote: post #51
elithrar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it. It's clear that the author was overspending—even a small dyno with a resource-hungry language like Rails can do a lot of traffic—but there's a lot more than just installing a web server, DB. Firewalls? WAL-E backups? Monitoring (of any kind)? A correct TLS setup? DB security? Setting those up—in a way that you can repli…

Sure, but most (all) virtual setups have automatic snapshots, and backups for a few bucks a month. The rest you mentioned, you SHOULD learn if you're getting your hands into web services. What happens when something goes wrong, who is fixing it if you have no idea how any of it is running? I guess I'm old school. You learn the basics first, and build upon it. It's not reinventing any wheel.

Before I quit using DigitalOcean, I enabled backups and found they were very spotty - occurring roughly weekly, but not on a predictable schedule (8 days, 6 days, 4 days, seemingly random). Not something to rely on in place of a real database backup policy (more like an emergency backup of last resort).

Plus, they recommend against[1] enabling backups for I/O heavy VMs (so, databases) because of the copy-on-write implementation and its effect on I/O performance.

I ended up going to AWS because I was tired of having to string together a web of iptables rules (e.g. when you provision a new webserver VM you have to iterate over your Postgres, Redis, HAProxy, Elasticsearch, etc. VMs to poke holes in their firewalls), setup WAL-E and monitoring it / testing backups, setup 3rd party monitoring VM resources for issues (CPU/memory/disk space), having to manage package updates and security fixes, aggregating logs to a 3rd party with rsyslog, all that stuff.

Unless your app is a complete throwaway that you don't care about getting hacked or losing all your data, you quickly have to start worrying about this stuff and it becomes a huge burden to roll it yourself on VPS providers.

[1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understandi...

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#54

Post by AngeloR »

skorecky wrote: post #52
bpatrianakos wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the barrier is just as high. I taught a ten week course in back end development and I think the students would have done equally well deploying on a VPS or Heroku. The curriculum called for using Heroku but I regret following it now. Heroku bills itself as being easy for a beginner but go ahead and try to deploy any simple Rails or Node project using their guides. Half the time something goes wrong. Either…

Many pet projects you can run for Free on Heroku. Their docs are pretty straight forward, not sure what your hiccups were but I've deployed quite a few sites to Heroku without much if any issues. The asset pipeline in rails use to cause some issues but I think that has all been resolved with the 12 factor gem. Also setting up a VPS is in no way easier than Heroku. You have to install nginx, ruby, mysql etc. Then you…

Instead of spending money on a vps for my last side project, I went the heroku route and it was even easier. I spent 7$ on a private github repo.. which synced to heroku. And a free CircleCI account that also synced up with everything. Then just pushing my branch meant, automated testing and with heroku pipelines, a PR meant automatic test env.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#55

Post by nezza-_- »

userium wrote: post #50
nezza-_- wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The open rate of the email was 45,8% How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

The emails were sent via Mailchimp, the open rate was gotten from Mailchimp's reports (analytics).

Yep indeed it's faulty: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-...

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#56

Post by nezza-_- »

myth_buster wrote: post #49
nezza-_- wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The open rate of the email was 45,8% How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

From MailChimp's website http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click-rates

And: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-...

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#57

Post by pzaich »

overcast wrote: post #17

I don't really understand the costs involved here. You can get a pretty powerful DigitalOcean droplet for $24 a month, which I personally run multiple side projects on with no issues. This could have stayed up indefinitely to tinker with, while you work on other stuff!

I have done the same for my side projects and used cost as excuse to force myself to learn basic devOps.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#58

Post by overcast »

waffle_ss wrote: post #53
overcast wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but most (all) virtual setups have automatic snapshots, and backups for a few bucks a month. The rest you mentioned, you SHOULD learn if you're getting your hands into web services. What happens when something goes wrong, who is fixing it if you have no idea how any of it is running? I guess I'm old school. You learn the basics first, and build upon it. It's not reinventing any wheel.

Before I quit using DigitalOcean, I enabled backups and found they were very spotty - occurring roughly weekly, but not on a predictable schedule (8 days, 6 days, 4 days, seemingly random). Not something to rely on in place of a real database backup policy (more like an emergency backup of last resort). Plus, they recommend against[1] enabling backups for I/O heavy VMs (so, databases) because of the copy-on-write imp…

I'm not in any way pushing the DigitalOcean setup. It was just cheap, easy to use, and offered FreeBSD as a host. I don't get spammed by them, no reliability issues, so I really don't have a reason to move at this time. If a project of mine gets too big, I'll evaluate then. But they are good for iterating lots of new ideas quickly.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#59

Post by mintplant »

wuliwong wrote: post #31
overcast wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

@overcast For some reason I couldn't reply to your last comment but yea, absolutely, $225/month is ridiculous.

If the "reply" link doesn't show up in the thread view, try going to the comment's permalink page (by clicking on the timestamp).

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#60

Post by mintplant »

reacweb wrote: post #15
userium wrote: post #2

Author here, happy to get feedback!

"monthly costs of running the service" was your killing argument. Why didn't you migrate to a cheap hosting ? My single host at scaleway (3.59€ per month) can handle many toy projects and gives me all freedom.

Or OVH, where ~$4/mo gets you a VPS with 2GB of RAM.
Post reply on HN