You're assuming that the goal is to make something valuable. There are forums with more traffic than this, which don't make money. They're hobby projects.
Making something valuable is not the same as making money. May be you just want to feel that you're doing something good for the community. However, money is the universal way to measure value. And if you think that you create an enormous value for the community, and it's something that is important to you personally, paying a few hundred bucks a month for it should be a no-brainer.
You mean like how repairing roads should be a no brainer, but no-one wants to pay for it?
Caching is, in general, a good thing. But it's worth thinking about how you do it. I recently sped up a large system by dropping the use of redis entirely - because it was being badly used. During a single request there might be 50+ cache-lookups, each taking a round-trip to a remote redis server to fetch a single key at a time. Batching those up to a set/hash would have been more efficient, but the codebase had evol…
Couldn't you have cached locally using something like ehcache?
Perhaps, yes. It was the latency of the network calls that was killing performance, so something local, or even redis on localhost, would have been better.
TekMoi is right. I have an Alexa top 6k site which is vastly more complicated (media hosting, load balancing, multiple VMs, DDOS protection, transactional emails, automated backups) which costs $200 / month on AWS. The fact that this person is spending nearly as much to support 50k users a day as I do to support more than 4 million cannot be hand-waived away by "people are so free to judge other's[sic] situations". T…
Both you and TekMoi should probably value your own time higher. The cost savings are great, but once you spend 4 hours on configuring a database server, that'll probably be $200+ worth of your time and, thus, wipe out most of the savings.
It doesn’t cost anything to spend 4 hours of your time doing anything, so it doesn’t really wipe out any savings. Reducing a bill from $400 month to $200 is real money, not some theoretical time/value judgement.
And, as others have mentioned, there is enormous value in knowing how to operate on a fairly lean tech stack. It makes it so much simpler to scale effectively while keeping costs down.
Thanks for the compliments! Yes, the server instances are definitely too large. I was previously running on 2 instances that were half the size and ran into some problems which I thought I could fix by increasing specs. Turns out the problems were not related to specs and now I'm stuck with the instance size (on DigitalOcean you can only up-size not down-size) I use Postico too, but don't have enough SQL chops to get…
You’re already using blue/green for deployments, so why not: * replace the currently inactive server with a smaller instance * swap to the new instance and test the load * replace the second server For such a small app I’d drop the blue/green (most deploys will likely only take a few seconds?) and host Postgres on the same server. Also, I’d move metabase onto a DO instance. Any reason you’re using DNSSimple over a ch…
These are all my suggestions, I would also add look for ways to spread out tasks to other smaller VMs - the general pricing is +$5 "per" ($5 per +1 vCPU, $5 per +2G vRAM), a $5/$10 webserver only handle static asset delivery, then apps on middle tier app servers at $15/$20 would give better fault tolerance and spread out the load and still keep blue/green.
I beg to differ. In my experience, the complicated setups that are justified by the argument of "reliability" have more downtime then a single VPS. The reason is probably that there are more moving parts and more has to be maintained / can go wrong. These days, a single VPS in the right datacenter has excellent uptime.
I have a VPS that has not gone down in 5 years. It still has a redundant slave because I'm not going to bet my reputation on everything going right.
Me too, with the cheapest Kimsufi server from OVH (something like 3€ a month).
To be fair I can't be sure because a less than 5 minutes downtime would probably go unnoticed, but the fact is I never hear about this server.
Both you and TekMoi should probably value your own time higher. The cost savings are great, but once you spend 4 hours on configuring a database server, that'll probably be $200+ worth of your time and, thus, wipe out most of the savings.
It doesn’t cost anything to spend 4 hours of your time doing anything, so it doesn’t really wipe out any savings. Reducing a bill from $400 month to $200 is real money, not some theoretical time/value judgement. And, as others have mentioned, there is enormous value in knowing how to operate on a fairly lean tech stack. It makes it so much simpler to scale effectively while keeping costs down.
Making something valuable is not the same as making money. May be you just want to feel that you're doing something good for the community. However, money is the universal way to measure value. And if you think that you create an enormous value for the community, and it's something that is important to you personally, paying a few hundred bucks a month for it should be a no-brainer.
You mean like how repairing roads should be a no brainer, but no-one wants to pay for it?
Even here in Russia, which is famous for its awful roads, there's plenty of private roads, both closed to public, and operated for-profit with toll booths that are in great condition. Tragedy of the commons doesn't happen when things actually belong to someone.
I'm confused about their thought process on their $95 a month DO servers. They mention using a blue-green deployment strategy and a managed database service. That implies their web servers are stateless, or at least stateless enough to switch between the servers seamlessly. But then they go on to say they don't want to downgrade because it means provisioning new servers. Even in the worst case scenario of not using c…
Or you can spend that few hours writing a blog post for marketing purposes or figure out how to actually generate revenue.