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Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

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Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#131

Post by FpUser »

mihcsab wrote: post #95
FpUser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a life beyond AWS. I host applications (including ones responsible for 10s of millions in revenue) on dedicated servers rented from Hetzner and OVH. Do not even do containers as my normal deployment is server per particular business (with standby) and the cost of renting a dedicated server comparatively to revenue is microscopic. CI/CD / setup from scratch / backup / restore is handled by a single bash scrip…

What do you use for backup?

scheduled jobs running pg_dump and rsync

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#132

Post by FpUser »

lambdaba wrote: post #91
FpUser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a life beyond AWS. I host applications (including ones responsible for 10s of millions in revenue) on dedicated servers rented from Hetzner and OVH. Do not even do containers as my normal deployment is server per particular business (with standby) and the cost of renting a dedicated server comparatively to revenue is microscopic. CI/CD / setup from scratch / backup / restore is handled by a single bash scrip…

I like this. Out of curiosity, could you share your bash script?

I do not want to clean it up from some revealing things, so no. But it is fairly trivial. If you are an experienced programmer you would not have troubles writing one up one yourself in no time.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#134

Post by nyolfen »

great writeup that overlaps with a lot of stuff i do for myself — a few related tool suggestions from my own experience are caddy for https (absurdly easy config — seriously, i would never go back to nginx if i could help it) and netdata for server monitoring (open source, optionally connectable to a web dashboard with email alerts)

[0] https://caddyserver.com/

[1] https://github.com/netdata/netdata

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#135

Post by conradfr »

throwaway744678 wrote: post #5

I (my company) use a similar approach: a single dedicated server with docker containers, by using dokku [0], for an heroku-like self-hosted PaaS. Most of our applications are either: - app developped in-house (django/flask): Procfile + deploy with git push - standard app with a docker image available: deploy directly Dokku comes with useful "service" plugins for databases, auto https (letsencrypt), virtual hosts... O…

Same here (not a company but some paying users) but with CapRover.

Multiple webapps (Symfony, Phoenix, Magento) on a 20€/m OneProvider server.

Databases backups are done by a cron bash script which uploads to a ftp.

It works fine, only real downside for my use case is the small downtime after a deploy. I probably would use something else for a frequently deployed pro webapp.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#136

Post by dspillett »

FpUser wrote: post #129
throwaway984393 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business benefits of the cloud are ability to scale, an API for everything, cheap automation, cheap managed services for everything, and good customer support. Like you say for your model none of those things may be important, but they're killer features for others

>"ability to scale" I write C++ business API servers. On the type of hardware I rent from Hetzner /OVH they're capable of processing thousands of requests per second. This would cover probably 90+ percent of real world businesses. >"an API for everything" Not sure what you mean here. API for what in particular? My servers talk to partner systems of real businesses. We consume their APIs and they consume ours. Integra…

> > "an API for everything"

> Not sure what you mean here.

I assume referring to APIs for controlling and monitoring the infrastructure, not anything about APIs you may provide in your application or consume from external sources.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#137

Post by unclebucknasty »

exhaze wrote: post #66

Three independent, but somewhat related thoughts on this topic: 1). On HOWTO articles about infra (1/2): I'd like to see more articles that lead with requirements, rather than setups that then justify the setup with requirements. Like, congrats, you managed to host a bunch of web applications via containers on a dedicated server. It's really nice for a super personal project and I'm sure it helped OP gain a lot of op…

I think there's good value to be had from articles like these, depending on where you're starting and how you approach this kind of work.

On the requirements side, one thing I would like to see though is an approach for determining how your applications will scale on cloud infra.

For instance on AWS, which RDS and EC2 instances will suffice out of the gate, and at what IOPS/bandwidth? And when will I need to scale them? The metric is simply how many users can I support with acceptable response times on a given configuration?

Sure, we know that's highly dependent on the applications, stack, etc. But I've often thought there should be some rubric for approaching this that doesn't require going heavy on performance analyzers, load balance testing, etc, which frequently seem like overkill out of the gate when you're making your initial config selections.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#138

Post by pedropaf »

laydn wrote: post #84
progx wrote: post #13

Easy setup with: - traefik (nginx proxy with auto letscencrypt) - portainer (docker container management) - fail2ban (basic security) - logwatch (server / security stats by mail) - munin (server stats) - restic (cloud backup) - unattended-upgrades (auto install security updates) - apticron (weekly info) - n8n (automatisation for e.g. quick info via telegram, if something not work) Run every app that you want in your…

A few months ago, I made an offer of $100 in one of the freelancing websites, for someone to set-up something like your configuration on one of my Digital Ocean instances. I asked for a few more apps to be installed (git, svn, etc). There were no takers :-) I think a web site/service which lets you choose "apps" and spawns a VPS instance would be very useful and profitable (Think "ninite for VPS"). I started to work…

Something like CapRover wouldn't work for you? Although it's not very up to date. And the one-click collection of apps, is a bit outdated too. You'd need to reference your custom docker images.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#139

Post by _xnmw »

This is super useful, thanks for posting. I hate AWS complexity-as-a-service, just give me a damn baremetal machine and let me run and tune my own services. I love having full visibility into raw disk/cpu performance and even benching my hardware.

So many useful comparisons here, Bunny.net vs. CloudFlare, and the fact that you got this far without even using fail2ban!

Questions (not necessarily for OP, but for anyone)

- Give us an idea of the maximum load this server is doing in terms of requests per second?

- Anyone choosing AMD Epyc over Intel to avoid spectre/meltdown mitigation slowdowns?

- Any use of postfix or other SMTP forwarding via Postmark or another email provider?

- What is your Postgres configuration like for your heaviest loads? max_connections? Just wondering how Postgres scales across cores.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#140

Post by unclebucknasty »

nicoburns wrote: post #72
exhaze wrote: post #66

Three independent, but somewhat related thoughts on this topic: 1). On HOWTO articles about infra (1/2): I'd like to see more articles that lead with requirements, rather than setups that then justify the setup with requirements. Like, congrats, you managed to host a bunch of web applications via containers on a dedicated server. It's really nice for a super personal project and I'm sure it helped OP gain a lot of op…

The problem with AWS is that you can’t really do anything without understanding 1. IAM, and 2. VPCs/networking. And these are probably the two most complicated parts. For DIY you’re probably best off avoiding AWS

I had this feeling when I first started with AWS years ago. It was hard to find a good overview and all of the Amazon doc on individual services seemed to start in the middle. So, a lot of my initial understanding came through intuition, and trial and error.

For many scenarios, you can completely ignore IAM, but it's definitely not advisable.

On the VPC side, it's actually fairly straightforward, but you may need to come up to speed a bit on some networking concepts if (like me) that's not your background. Nothing too onerous though, especially if you have some technical background.

There are also some gotchas that allow you to too easily do things like create security groups or other resources outside the correct VPC. If you overlook that, you're in for some brick wall head-banging 'til you figure it out.

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