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Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#51

Post by scarface74 »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #44
ransom1538 wrote: post #32

1. Stay on AWS only. 2. Pay for a Business Support plan. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/ 3. Call business support about something "how do I restart my server" - so you know how to file a ticket, get a feel for how quick the response is and how it works. Do not over think this. EG: terraform templates

re: terraform, that's only part of the picture right? What do you recommend for provisioning? I assume Terraform + Packer? I looked into these a while back and they seemed good. My only concern was that my target was very low-cost setups, and I wanted something like Packer but let me provision multiple images onto a single machine. Eg, if I just used Packer, as far as I could tell I would have to have 1 machine per i…

Don’t do Terraform. If you are already on AWS. Use CloudFormation. You are paying for the business support plan. They aren’t going to support your Terraform deployment.

I haven’t used Packer, but could you use CodeBuild/CodeDeploy/CodePipeline? Again if you’re on AWS you might as well take advantage of their support.

You can deploy Docker images using CloudFormation either to Fargate and not have to worry about servers or to EC2 instances (? I haven’t tried).

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#52

Post by jedieaston »

jasonkester wrote: post #36

I build my stuff on top of a stack that hardly ever goes down. All my SaaS products run on a Windows server, with SQL Server as a database and ASP.NET on IIS running the public sites. You can probably come up with a lot of uncharitable things to say about those technologies, but "flimsy" and "fragile" likely aren't in the list. As a result, when things go seriously wrong, the application pool will recycle itself and…

I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#54

Post by brokenkebab »

There are a lot of whatever-as-a-service offers which can relieve you of updating, patching, and restarting. But if your troubles originate as bugs in software, poorly formatted data, or something along this lines then human supervision is probably the only solution.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#55

Post by nickthemagicman »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #10

Back when I was working on everything myself, I deployed everything through AWS Lambda and API Gateway, with all my static assets on S3 and CloudFront. I had exactly zero infrastructure issues over the course of two years and never dealt with security patches, SSH'ing, etc. If I were doing billions of requests, it may not have been the most cost effective, but it helped me scale without worrying about typical devops…

Did you ever have any problems with the function concurrency limit?

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#56

Post by fulafel »

hellcow wrote: post #18

The only way to achieve high availability is to have redundancy of all things. Random things will go wrong that you can't predict. Boxes will die suddenly and without reason, even after months of working fine without changes, and always at the worst possible moment. Your system needs to be built to withstand that. I'll take the opposite approach of everyone here and recommend against serverless, kubernetes, and Herok…

IMO a single founder doesn't need "high availability" as the term is usually used (five nines stuff with high operational complexity). If you can get it cheaply by using eg Heroku, it's a nice bonus.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#57

Post by juliangoldsmith »

jedieaston wrote: post #52
jasonkester wrote: post #36

I build my stuff on top of a stack that hardly ever goes down. All my SaaS products run on a Windows server, with SQL Server as a database and ASP.NET on IIS running the public sites. You can probably come up with a lot of uncharitable things to say about those technologies, but "flimsy" and "fragile" likely aren't in the list. As a result, when things go seriously wrong, the application pool will recycle itself and…

I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).

Last I knew, Visual Studio Professional was about $500 for a single user. SQL Server can get expensive depending on what you're hosting, but IIS and ASP.NET don't cost anything. All you'd need is a Windows box for those.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#59

Post by bdcravens »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #57
jedieaston wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).

Last I knew, Visual Studio Professional was about $500 for a single user. SQL Server can get expensive depending on what you're hosting, but IIS and ASP.NET don't cost anything. All you'd need is a Windows box for those.

SQL Server on RDS includes the SQL Server license and is very cost effective for what you get. (Backups, point in time restore, etc). They also offer EC2 with SQL Server but I’d rather pay the slight premium for the additional management.
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