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How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

blog.badsectorlabs.com

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#61

Impressive but my side projects are even cheaper to run because 1/3 of the way through I lose excitement, never finish them and then don’t do anything with them. ;) Nice post!

Or do it like it was 1999. Host it yourself. I had a $20 DO, I've downgraded it to the $5/month plan. My next goal is to move that shut down the VM sometimes this year and host it on a raspberry pi myself.

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#62
post #4

Very nice. I built a boilerplate Lambda app that puts a lot of this cost effective architecture into practice: https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas One difference is that I use SNS for cheap email or SMS error notifications.

This is awesome and will save people tons of time setting up something similar!

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#63

"Getting a push alert any time there is an error helps us respond to issues as soon as they come up. " Oh god no. Maybe if this system is not expected to ever grow in complexity. Otherwise this will become a big source of frustration really soon. And even if it does not, it's very easy to get a flood of non-actionable alerts for a transient condition. It would be better to collect error rates and alert on that. Also…

A valid concern. However even after reddit and hacker news has had their way with the site, my phone has been impressively quiet. These push notifications are only for cases where the lambda functions thrown an error that isn't handled anywhere else (i.e. something is very wrong).

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#65
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can also use a negative price! I wonder what would happen if you went ahead with that. Presumably the payment gateway wouldn't pay me $5. Seems a strange choice to be having those parameters in a GET.

I agree, the param passing is not ideal. Session storage/local storage is another option.

Temporary guid on client side, data on server side

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#66

I can modify the price in the checkout by changing the URL parameter. Really?

Sure you can overpay if you want, and you can underpay and not get the tickets you are trying to obtain fraudulently. It's only a problem if the vendor actual sends you product that you didn't pay for. This isn't an instant digital download.

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#68
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can also use a negative price! I wonder what would happen if you went ahead with that. Presumably the payment gateway wouldn't pay me $5. Seems a strange choice to be having those parameters in a GET.

I agree, the param passing is not ideal. Session storage/local storage is another option.

This is just obfuscation. Making it harder to hack won't prevent hacks. Anything that can be changed by the client, expect the client to change it.

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the param passing is not ideal. Session storage/local storage is another option.

Everything that can be modified by the user is not suitable. The price must be stored on the server side, everything on the client side is subject to modification.

The price is checked server side. You have to pass the price somehow to the client in order to display it. This is no different than any other ecommerce site, except that you can see it in a GET param.

I can "change the price" of anything on Amazon with dev tools, but that won't help me when I go to buy it. I appreciate the concern because amazingly this has been a real vulnerability on sites before (recently on a crypto exchange I think).

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#70
post #17
post #7

> After the free-tier expires it will be less than $5, but the fact remains: it's crazy cheap. I like the idea behind serverless development, but DO is $5/month and is easy to setup and maintain. From what I understand as your business grows AWS costs skyrocket and just starting out it's more complicated than a DO solution. The idea is great, but looking forward to the day where serverless is the default solution bec…

The costs skyrocket if you’re not doing it right - otherwise it tends to be linear with request count. The nice thing, though, is that you don’t have to panic or do anything at any scale - it’ll just keep running along. Once you hit high levels of traffic, instead of panicking and trying to add more servers and fixing DB structure, you do a cost benefit analysis and see what to do next. Either work on reducing your c…

Exactly this. You could host cheaper with a really low tier VPS, but as soon as you get posted to hacker news, game over. If traffic increases to such a degree that this architecture is no longer the best choice, we can move off without constantly fighting to keep our tiny server(s) alive.
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