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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?

#221

Post by arunpn123 »

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.…

Nice website jmstfv. I have a question about how customers trust your monitoring saas. Say I have a website/service, my deployment config would probably be similar to what you have. If AWS goes down, both mine and your monitoring saas will go down. Can you please share some details about your architecture that makes it more reliable? I am curious about what sort of customers are you targeting.

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

#222

Post by jmstfv »

arunpn123 wrote: post #221
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.…

Nice website jmstfv. I have a question about how customers trust your monitoring saas. Say I have a website/service, my deployment config would probably be similar to what you have. If AWS goes down, both mine and your monitoring saas will go down. Can you please share some details about your architecture that makes it more reliable? I am curious about what sort of customers are you targeting.

Background workers are geographically spread out across multiple AWS regions: https://tryhexadecimal.com/docs/workers#locations

It is highly unlikely that all of them will be knocked down at the same time.

If workers suspect that there is something wrong with your website, they will check it from all locations at once. Website is only marked as down if more than half of them can agree on that. That alone knocks down most of the false positives: https://tryhexadecimal.com/docs/uptime#sequence-and-frequenc...

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

#223

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

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…

geez... why do these things always need to happen right around the holidays. I mean the disaster couldn't wait a week or two later?

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

#224

Post by heliodor »

byteshock wrote: post #209
heliodor wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people are happy using the industry-standard open-source tools: - metrics system (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, etc.) - dashboards (Grafana) - alerts (both the metrics system and Grafana can handle this) If you're not a big-data company, you can self-host instances of these products reliably. Disclosure: My startup, https://HostedMetrics.com , provides turnkey hosted versions of these software packages. I…

Your product doesn’t even come close to what datadog offers....

Datadog has ~9000 customers. I imagine the respective open-source tools have many more customers than that, which says something about the perceived value of the two approaches. Also, Datadog wraps many tools into one whereas the open-source solutions have singular purposes. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

__d wrote: post #141

You 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…

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by miemo »

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.…

Your website looks awesome, I really like the clean design.

Have you considered a trial extending to their first outage notification, rather than 14 days?

I would imagine if they don't see an outage in 14 days they're not seeing the value.

However if their trial expired following their first 'site is down' reminder - that's where your value comes in.

Just my $2c

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

#227

Post by jmstfv »

miemo wrote: post #226
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.…

Your website looks awesome, I really like the clean design. Have you considered a trial extending to their first outage notification, rather than 14 days? I would imagine if they don't see an outage in 14 days they're not seeing the value. However if their trial expired following their first 'site is down' reminder - that's where your value comes in. Just my $2c

That's really interesting, it never occurred to me before (because I've never seen such thing), but it makes sense. A lot of work happens in the background, and folks don't see the value until their website is down or their certificate is about to expire.

I'll investigate that. Appreciate the suggestion.

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

#228

Post by nickthemagicman »

scarface74 wrote: post #213
nickthemagicman wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome thanks! Sorry to bug but this is very interesting to me. Did you use a framework like Serverless?

No. I’m of the belief that when you choose a platform, go all in. Given a choice between the Serverless platform and AWS’s Serverless Application Model, I would choose SAM. I also work for a company that pays for the business support plan, they will help you to an extent with any weirdness in their own platform - but not with third party utilities. Another advantage with using SAM, is that you can create and configur…

Thanks so much! This is really interesting. I think acloud.guru has a similar set up and they pay basically nothing for their millions of QPS. Going to research this more for my next project.

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

#229

Post by nh2 »

sphix0r wrote: post #211
nh2 wrote: post #147

I rent dedicated servers at Hetzner. No cloud machines, no hosted cloud services for production beyond DNS. * 3 machines in separate data centers (equivalent of AWS AZs) for >= 30 EUR/month each. ECC RAM. * These machines are /very/ reliable. Uptime of > 300 days are common, reboots happen only for the relevant kernel updates. * Triple-redundancy Postgres synchronous replication with automatic failover (using Stolon)…

Very well-thought infra and nice metrics. What kind of application are you running if I may ask?

Computer vision, specifically reconstruction of 3D models from 2D photos, as a service.
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