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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?

#151

Post by thrower123 »

EastSmith wrote: post #116
thrower123 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You'll want to switch to the Single Database and change the pricing model from vCore to DTU. Then you can pick Basic or Standard and adjust the size and compute resources.

Basic will do quite a lot; I use one to load test our application and haven't hit limits.

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

#152

Post by daniel_iversen »

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.…

> Monitor your infrastructure and set up alerts [..] "fatal" OR "exception" OR "error"

I almost have the regex "fatal|invalid|unknown|error|except|critical|cannot" in muscle memory many years after having last had to type it - must have typed it thousands of times tailing and grepping logs :- )

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

#153

Post by Ologn »

aspectmin wrote: post #76

FWIW - if you just want to make sure your services are up - consider: 1) pagerduty.com or uptimerobot.com for remote monitoring to make sure you site(s) are up (and get alerts when they're not). 2) Datadog or New Relic if you want deeper monitoring (application performance, database performance, diagnostics/debugging. 3) Rollbar.com (site doesn't seem to respond) for site performance/errors. 4) Roll your own with Pro…

> Nagios, MRTG

I am used to rolling my own and use Nagios to make sure my servers and web sites are up and URLs and scripts functioning.

I used to use MRTG and RRDTool in days past when I was responsible for monitoring many servers, switches and routers.

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

#154

Post by fanf2 »

apankrat wrote: post #110

> I was able to sign in to the AWS console and resolve the issue Kids these days. I had a RAM stick fry in one of the physical machines sitting in a colo 1 hour drive away. Not die, but just start flipping bits here and there, triggering most bizarre alerts you can imagine. On the night of December 24th. Now, that was fun. --- To add --- If you are a single founder - expect downtime and expect it to be stressful. Inh…

That reminds me of the time we had a DIMM actually melt on the 22nd December http://fanf2.user.srcf.net/hermes/doc/misc/orange-fire/

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

#156

Post by malyk »

randlet wrote: post #118
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

Yes, if you need that.

Many many businesses can survive on a $25 a month 1x dyno and the free database tier (and free sendgrid, free newrelic, free whatever other addon) and can be pretty sure their site will basically never go down.

It's a fantastic security blanket, but...as your business grows you'll start to pay. The question then becomes "If I do all this myself on AWS (or azure or gcp) how much time am I going to be sacrificing time against building my business dealing with random infrastructure crap?" Or "at what point does it make sense to hire someone to focus on all this infrastructure and how much would that cost vs. just paying for heroku?"

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

#157

Post by peterwwillis »

Yes, you can pay managed hosting providers different amounts of money for different levels of support.

Managed support will usually only monitor and fix basic infrastructure and respond to support requests from you. They often won't monitor or fix your applications/services; for that you can set up your own application monitoring and tests. NewRelic is a good all-in-one choice, but there are plenty more out there. To call you during an incident, you'd also adopt PagerDuty.

In order to avoid service outage in general, you want to hook up some kind of monitor to something that re-starts your services and infrastructure. This will only fix crashes; it won't fix issues like disks filling up, network outages, application bugs, too many hits to your service, etc.

You should be able to find small businesses who specialize in selling support contracts for all levels of support. By signing a contract and on-boarding a 24/7 support technician, you can get them to do basically whatever you need to be fixed when it goes down. I don't have suggestions for these, maybe someone else does (it used to be common for SMBs in the 2000's).

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

#158

Post by cddotdotslash »

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.)

I setup a CloudWatch event rule to ping the function every 10 minutes, which keeps the function warm without costing much at all.

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

#159

Post by asadlionpk »

We are a very small team at https://codeinterview.io. We recently achieved a respectable level of reliability with a tiny team. Some things you should do:

- Atleast have a pool of 2 instances (ideally per service) running under an auto-scaler or a managed K8s (GKE is best) with LB in front. May also want to explore EBS and google cloud run. If you can use them, use them!

- Uptime alerts. pingdom (or newrelic alerts) with pagerduty added.

- Health checks! The trick is to recover the failed container/pod/service before you get that pagerduty call. Ideally, if you have 2 of each service running #2 will handle the requests until the #1 is recreated.

- Sentry + newrelic APM + infra: You should monitor all error stack traces, request throughput, avg response time. For infra, you mainly need to watch memory and CPU usage. Also on each downtime, you should have greater visibility at what caused it. You should set alerts on higher than normal memory usage so you can prevent the crash.

- Logs, your server logs should be stored somewhere (stackdriver on gcloud or cloudwatch on aws).

These might sound overwhelming for a single person but these are one time efforts after which they are mostly automatic.

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

#160

Post by owaislone »

I've used runscope.com and I love it. I don't know about their pricing so can't tell if it's suitable for someone in your situation but I'm sure there are tons of similar services. You could also build your own with Lambda and hope AWS is reliable enough to keep Lambda running. (Who monitors the monitoring tools? :) )
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