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How I Built a Side Project

stayintech.com

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Re: How I Built a Side Project

#81

Post by ahstilde »

drchiu wrote: post #74
brandon272 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How scalable does a simple checklist app need to be? Especially when that checklist app has next to no users? I just don't think that managing your own SSL cert and backups are worth $250 a month for a tiny application that no one uses. Logging into your VPS once a month to install updates is beyond trivial. That might not be my strategy if I had hundreds of paying customers, but the author of the article didn't have…

Agree with brandon272. $250/mo is not a viable business plan. As much as I'd like to say my time is more valuable, honestly I'd rather save my $250/mo and built out a solution that's cheaper. For the naysayers, my relatively small apps receive over 300k reqs/day and it's hosted on a much, much cheaper infrastructure. Just remember to cache things where appropriate and you'd be surprised how much $30-40 in server cost…

What sort of infrastructure?

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#82

Post by frandroid »

true_religion wrote: post #78
skywhopper wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance? I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so th…

He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any VPS should be able to handle that since its static traffic. At its height, 600 people were daily active users (at a most generous estimate). Unless those 600 people were all active at the same time of day, you'd be able to handle it easily. People underestima…

*She

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#83

Post by NetStrikeForce »

true_religion wrote: post #78
skywhopper wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance? I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so th…

He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any VPS should be able to handle that since its static traffic. At its height, 600 people were daily active users (at a most generous estimate). Unless those 600 people were all active at the same time of day, you'd be able to handle it easily. People underestima…

> Zero-day security issues? They're handled by a managed server host. All kernel level updates are.

And that is how much per month? A quick check with a well known company shows £350/mo. That sounds expensive, but on the other hand I'm not sure I would be leaving my security in hands of a $10/mo shop :)

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#84

Post by skywhopper »

brandon272 wrote: post #72
skywhopper wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance? I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so th…

How scalable does a simple checklist app need to be? Especially when that checklist app has next to no users? I just don't think that managing your own SSL cert and backups are worth $250 a month for a tiny application that no one uses. Logging into your VPS once a month to install updates is beyond trivial. That might not be my strategy if I had hundreds of paying customers, but the author of the article didn't have…

Managing SSL, backups, and updates well and correctly take time. Not just the time to do them but the time to learn what needs to be done. A productive software developer is not one who worries about squeezing every dollar out of her service providers. If you already know how to handle all the other services or enjoy learning, go for it. But for some people it's best to focus on what you enjoy and are good at, and outsource the rest.

I agree that if this app is just a hobby, it's not worth having all the extra services. But given the services provided, $250/month, when weighed against a good software developer's time, is a good value.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#85

Post by e12e »

nezza-_- wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> 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.

So, this just counts broken email clients that load external images in email (which, I suppose are a lot -- but they're still broken, IMNHO).

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#86

Post by true_religion »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #83
true_religion wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any VPS should be able to handle that since its static traffic. At its height, 600 people were daily active users (at a most generous estimate). Unless those 600 people were all active at the same time of day, you'd be able to handle it easily. People underestima…

> Zero-day security issues? They're handled by a managed server host. All kernel level updates are. And that is how much per month? A quick check with a well known company shows £350/mo. That sounds expensive, but on the other hand I'm not sure I would be leaving my security in hands of a $10/mo shop :)

Kernel updates really ought to be an automated process at any company. At that point it doesn't really matter if you have 3 servers going for $350 or 49 servers going for $50 a pop.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#87

Post by true_religion »

frandroid wrote: post #82
true_religion wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any VPS should be able to handle that since its static traffic. At its height, 600 people were daily active users (at a most generous estimate). Unless those 600 people were all active at the same time of day, you'd be able to handle it easily. People underestima…

*She

Sorry, it looks like I can't edit HN comments after 3 hours, but I had no idea of the gender of the person.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#88

Post by danneu »

overcast wrote: post #20
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.

$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.

The problem wasn't that they used Heroku.

It's that they didn't exercise the sort of thrift possible with a website that has no users, and I'd wager that they didn't really know how to since they were a tenderfoot. I made similar mistakes as a beginner, paying too much for too little for things I didn't know I didn't need.

Heroku saves a lot of time for the 1-2 dynos ($25-50/mo) you need to vet your idea. With free Cloudflare SSL termination and a $5/mo t2.micro Postgres database, what else do you need?

For comparison, my somewhat popular forum with 257 online users at the moment and 300k req/day runs on 2 dynos. $50/mo for the application servers + a deploy/config solution is nothing.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#90

Post by [deleted] »

brandon272 wrote: post #62

I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.

[deleted]
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