I wrote up a "technical continuity plan" that describes how to keep my web sites and APIs in maintenance mode in the event of my untimely demise. It has a list of bare-minimum things to do in the following week, month, and year, and describes the various third-party relationships and how to go about hiring a replacement administrator. I shared the doc with a few close friends. I hope it's not needed in the future, but just writing the doc was a useful exercise for me in the present.
Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
91–100 of 233 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I’ve spent close to 20 years hosting on IIS and have never had downtown attributable to it - especially since the app pool will recycle. Most of the issues I’ve seen were caused by people who didn’t know how to use EF correctly or badly tuned databases/queries. Even now, the only “Linux deployments” I do are either with Lambda or Fargate (Serverless Docker). I just don’t like managing servers. These days eve…
Code Red was 18 years ago, Blaster 16, Witty worm 15. All ate ISS servers for breakfast in highly automated fashion. 20 years of IIS with no downtown indeed.
Webpages on the server should be read-only... just in case!
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#93I know this is going to be down-voted to nonexistence since everyone now-a-days wants to serverless, AWS and what not. personally i've always used either hosting.com or inmotionhosting.com. yes they are more expensive than AWS and what not, but the thing is, they both have a support staff 24/7/365. I called whenever i need and have someone remote into my server and fix whatever is wrong. furthermore, i can even have the server alert emails routed to not only me, but them as well! so they know about the problem and are on it and i don't have to do a thing.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#94I 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?).
I use Leaseweb and they include a line item for the license price. It is all very affordable. I pay about $65 a month for a Windows 2016 server that I run IIS and SQL Server on for all of my projects I have going on. Very fast, affordable, etc. My SQL Server came from MS Bizspark for free (MSDN).
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#95I 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?).
Contabo VM with win server 2016 data center (includes sql sever 2016) costs me 16€/month.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#96The direct question was, can I pay someone to monitor my AWS. And the answer is yes.
You want redundancy at every layer including the human one. For 24x7 coverage, long term you need a team but for now two people will do.
Funny enough I was just talking to someone who passed all his AWS certifications and was looking for some AWS work.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#97Your main concern is of course limited time/resources, so you'll have to make compromises. The question is not whether your system will fail, the question is when. Have proper monitoring and alerting in place. But don't over engineer it, sometimes everything seems technically fine, but your support inbox will start getting user complaints. Resolve the issue, figure out the root cause, make sure this or similar stuff…
+1 -- most of the comments are about minimizing downtime, which you should of course to do to the extent practical, but at some point, whether you're a one-employee company or not, if you have no internet access and your servers are down you have to keep calm and accept that there will be some downtime and it's not the end of the world. You may even be surprised how few customers notice anything went wrong (depending on the kind of service you're running).
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#98Back 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…
How do you keep things fast? Lambda functions can have cold starts that introduce latency. How do you manage that? (From my small amount of experience - please prove me wrong.)
If you're doing a SPA, you can paper over the cold starts a bit, since the app itself will render, and it'll be background requests to load data that are impacted.
That still sucks, so then you can (hopefully) cache some things so that _some_ data begins to stream in. Or you can make it so your very high priority stuff has minimal dependencies - you can get a Lambda cold start in But still, in my experience, cold starts are a thing. If you have a high-traffic app or use Lambda warming, you decrease the # of people who experience a cold start, but at the end of the day, your p99 is going to be worse than a vanilla VM solution, because _some_ people will get cold starts. For some apps, that's OK - think line of business app where the first few pages can be served from static materials or cached materials, and you trigger the requests in the background.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#991) Setup a status page for what you want to monitor (/health/queuelength)
2) Point statuscake at that url
3) Connect statuscake to pagerduty.
This approach is easy to implement and scale
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#100Back 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…
How do you keep things fast? Lambda functions can have cold starts that introduce latency. How do you manage that? (From my small amount of experience - please prove me wrong.)
If latency is a big deal, don’t use lambda. I went from not knowing anything about Docker to having a Fargate (Serverless Docker) NodeJS app running in less than a day using a walkthrough I found.
But then again, I did already know the other fiddly bits of AWS.