Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

I use serverless-stack with every AWS service I can possibly use to reduce my code liability.

The system serves 4 PB of data to 60 million visitors per month. I have served 30 PB and 700 million file views since I started tracking usage somewhere in 2018.

I'll go from front to back:

- Most of the frontend is plain HTML, CSS and JS. I have started transitioning some pages to Svelte. I like this framework for its speed and simplicity

- Cloudflare Analytics to get basic info like which pages are popular and where my users are from

- The structure of the website (page wrap, menu, footer, etc) is managed with Go's template system

- Constellix for Geo-DNS. This automatically sends users to the server closest to them by doing Geo-IP lookups on the nameservers

- The user-facing servers are dedicated 10 Gbps Leaseweb servers, stuffed to the brim with SSDs in RAID6 for caching. Each of these servers cost €1200 per month. The storage servers are from Hetzner's SX line.

- The OS is Ubuntu 20.04 server edition. I use Ubuntu over Debian because it ships with TCP BBR

- The API is written in plain Go. The only HTTP libraries I use are httprouter for routing and Gorilla Websockets

- The storage system is custom built to spread files over multiple servers. I call it pixelstore, it's not open source (yet)

- The database is ScyllaDB. I landed on this one after going through multiple other systems with severe bottlenecks. I started with MySQL which was limited to a single location, so other locations had high latency. Then I tried CockroachDB, but it kept hanging under the load no matter how much hardware I threw at it. ScyllaDB is very fast and relatively reliable.

- UptimeRobot for monitoring

- Mailgun for account e-mail verifications

Feel free to ask me more questions :-)

Ionic, Stencil, Capacitor, TypeScript.

A CouchDB per user for auto sync across multiple devices.

Backend with Node, CouchDB, TypeScript, pm2 on a VPS.

Sendinblue for transactional emails (EU).

Why? Because Ionic lets me target iOS, Android and web with a single code base and almost no custom view code per platform. For non-technical users it is "good enough". Nobody ever complained about the non-nativeness.

CouchDB enables auto-sync with 0 lines of syncing code. It’s good, although there aren’t super many tutorials on the web.

CouchDB makes my app offline-first. I’d say this aspect alone is extremely great. A competitor has a similar app, but native. However, saving data requires an internet connection. This makes their native app feel slower than my non-native offline-first app.

For account management, I wouldn’t use it again, because I like SQL and that it makes it more easy to calculate some business statistics you might need only once.

2. Do you publish directly to the App Store, or do you send the application to the customer who publishes it for themselves?

The frontend is Vue 2.0 and TailwindCSS. No other major libraries besides the Vue standards (router, store, etc).

The site is delivered by Firebase Hosting and the backend is all Firebase (Firestore, Auth, Storage and Cloud Functions)

I absolutely love this stack. It’s so simple to run and requires no maintenance. Plus the fixed cost is $0. To deploy I use manually-triggered GitHub Actions workflows.

The best part of the whole thing is the local dev experience. With the Vue CLI and the Firebase Emulators I can run my entire stack locally with hot reload across frontend and backend. When I push to production I am confident.