I use Heroku for https://keygen.sh. Sometimes it pisses me off how big the bill is (~$1.5k/mo atm), but the net time savings are still worth it to me. I usually spend a total of 0 hours a month on managing servers/infra, and less than an hour a day on support. I'm thinking I'll move to AWS eventually to maximize margins, but right now this really works for me.
Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
161–170 of 233 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Offtopic: Really love how clean and readable the website is! Great work!
Indeedly! Very clean and simple, but not trivial or bare. Really good job, jmstfv.
From this link [0], it appears that the site uses Netlify. I'd love for the OP to point us in the direction of the theme and/or setup details as I am fairly new to Netlify
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#163I 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.…
I really wish you all the best jmstfv !
The website is obviously great but I love the fact that you have shared such great tips at https://tryhexadecimal.com/costs for solo founders/ small business owners.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
With regards to AWS RDS & EC2 multi-az deploys and cost...buy reserved instances! It is much cheaper if you can afford to pay up front for 1yr or 3 years at a time.
For EC2 you really should be using spot fleets and making sure your architecture can support instances coming and going.
I need to keep exactly two instances running (in separate AZs) and will never need to scale up beyond that...is it still worth investigating spot fleets in this case?
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#165> 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…
And for everyone else who doesn't feel like doing that, Amazon Lambda and a server in your closet are two other options.
If your workload doesn't fit into such a setup, then you simply need to take investment, optimize your code, or move closer to your colo
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#166I 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 :- )
watch out for someone writing [FATAL] in a form somewhere and it getting logged :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#167Sure, the person you pay is AWS.
You enable them to do it for you by creating HA infrastructure. Start by creating an autoscaling group that enforces a certain number of working application endpoints. You probably need an alb too. An app endpoint that fails healthcheck causes the asg to spin up another instance and auto-register with the alb. (You can snapshot your configured and working app endpoint as the base image).
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#168You might also want to consider some additional risks that are often overlooked: Billing issues. What happens if the credit card you use to pay for everything gets hijacked, and you're trapped with a blocked card trying to clean it up but your bank is taking their sweet time and won't give you another card until it's sorted? ALWAYS have a backup credit card. DNS Registrar. There's a hard SPOF in the DNS, where your r…
> What happens if the credit card you use to pay for everything gets hijacked, and you're trapped with a blocked card trying to clean it up but your bank is taking their sweet time and won't give you another card until it's sorted?
This happened to me this week. Luckily bank got me the new card within 2 business days, but still was a bit stressful and I burned a day getting my payment info updated everywhere.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am leaning toward learning k8s seriously and am actually curious on your take: is the overhead of learning and maintaining a k8s cluster actually better than using AWS features like autoscaling coupled with health checks?
Don't maintain the cluster. Have someone else run it for you. Unless you want K8s cluster to be the only thing you do. The advantage of K8s is that it abstracts so much away from you, that you should (in theory) be able to take the same YAML config file from AWS EKS to GCP GKE to Azure AKS...and it runs the same everywhere. Things like loadbalancering and HTTP ingress rules that normally would manual configs on each…
> Don't maintain the cluster. Have someone else run it for you. Unless you want K8s cluster to be the only thing you do.
This can be as simple as just using Google's GKE service.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
#170It boils down to sending some sort of notification so first responders know about the issue ASAP
You can do it at the OS level: on a windows OS for example: you use EventViewer and assign a task to specific type of log captured by the OS this task can then invoke a small app that sends emails if an error-log occurs or something like that
Application specific issue:
you can manually capture exceptions raised within the app and send notifications
there are many clever ways to do this and not hinder performance, and also not pollute your code-base with exception handling
you can spawn "fire and forget threads" that send notifications ...
let me know if need more ideas here
Integration tests:
given that you've built a strong suite of integration-tests covering all the functionality on your app
you can have have your integration tests run every 15min or so and send notifications if tests fail