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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?

#111

Post by PopeDotNinja »

samvher wrote: post #19

It really depends on the failure mode and the cost of failure. As mentioned by others you can encounter issues in external services which you have no control over and the best you can do in that case is fail gracefully until you're able to deal with the issue. If it's easy to detect failure, and a restart fixes the problem, it can be quite straightforward to set up some monitoring scripts that take care of this for y…

+1 for Erlang. Learning how to write OTP apps in Erlang taught me so much about building reliable systems.

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

#112

Post by rurp »

jmstfv wrote: post #78

I am a solo founder of a website monitoring SaaS [0]. Theoretically, my uptime should be higher than that of my customers'. Here are a few things that I found helpful in the course of running my business: * Redundancy. If you process background jobs, have multiple workers listening on the same queues (preferably in different regions or availability zones). Run multiple web servers and put them behind a load balancer.…

This is a great post, thanks. On your last point, do you mind sharing what you use to monitor the logs and send out alerts?

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

#113

Post by ElFitz »

I basically don't manage any servers. Everything runs on AWS Lambda & co (DynamoDB, S3,...)

It doesn't prevent an app-level outage (corrupted data in the database, bad architecture,...) but at least I don't have to worry about servers going down anymore.

As for the rest, unit & extensive integration tests along with continuous integration and linting. Oh, and a typed language. Moving from Javascript to Typescript was a blessing. But I still miss Swift.

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

#114

Post by krat0sprakhar »

jmstfv wrote: post #78

I am a solo founder of a website monitoring SaaS [0]. Theoretically, my uptime should be higher than that of my customers'. Here are a few things that I found helpful in the course of running my business: * Redundancy. If you process background jobs, have multiple workers listening on the same queues (preferably in different regions or availability zones). Run multiple web servers and put them behind a load balancer.…

Offtopic: Really love how clean and readable the website is! Great work!

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

#116

Post by EastSmith »

thrower123 wrote: post #70
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?).

A standard sized Azure App Service runs about a $75 a month. That will let you host about as many ASP.NET sites on it as you want - and there's no VM that you have to manage. Scaling up or out is pretty painless if you need to A SQL database on Azure runs about $5-$15 a month, depending on how you configure it. Once you throw in SSL certs and DNS management, you're probably looking at about $100 a month.

For SQL database the lowest I could find right now was costing around $600. Can you please share a link for the $5-15 price range?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-databa...

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

#117

Post by jmstfv »

tnolet wrote: post #109
jmstfv wrote: post #78

I am a solo founder of a website monitoring SaaS [0]. Theoretically, my uptime should be higher than that of my customers'. Here are a few things that I found helpful in the course of running my business: * Redundancy. If you process background jobs, have multiple workers listening on the same queues (preferably in different regions or availability zones). Run multiple web servers and put them behind a load balancer.…

This is is scary. This is exactly how I run my (also monitoring) SaaS and it shows that the OP has learned how to minimize risk and prepare for the worst. You are married to your mobile & laptop. I also shows there is no free lunch: you need to invest in redundancy.

From time to time I ponder about all the terrible things that could happen: what can go wrong will probably go wrong so it helps to be (kinda) prepared.

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

#118

Post by randlet »

freetonik wrote: post #2

Heroku. I just pay for the privilege of not thinking (almost) about such issues.

Heroku looks really expensive if you need e.g. a private network per client (compared to AWS VPC). Between $12k-$36k if I'm reading this correctly: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-private-spaces

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

#119

Post by ElFitz »

ryanolsonx wrote: post #80
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…

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.)

First, caching. Can be done via API Gateway or Cloudfront.

Second, minimizing the function's code size. Both by making small functions and then optimizing them (there are plugins for the serverless framework to do that)

Third, using a language with a minimized cold start. Some can have cold start latences lower than 1 second [^1]

[1]: https://mikhail.io/serverless/coldstarts/aws/

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

#120

Post by neilobremski »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #93

I 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…

This is really what I'd suggest to the OP, not necessarily THESE services but SOME form of out-sourced support. You can add technical redundancy until the cows come home and some bug is still going to stop things, probably with the worst possible timing. Until they've figured out enough AI to solve this issue (which would be expensive anyway, I'm sure) then I suggest adding human redundancy.
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