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What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

blog.healthchecks.io

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Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#21

Post by russellendicott »

rtpg wrote: post #10

Very cool setup. I know it's a bit silly, but anyone building out cloud services should look at this post and think about how easy it is to set up this. This is just slightly more complex than a static site, has a bit of heterogenity, but otherwise is a lot of known tools. Can your stack provide all of this without breaking the bank for the people signing up? Can it be done without having to learn a bunch of bespoke…

To be fair, the author is using several SaaS apps for core parts of his business: monitoring, email, DNS, etc. He's just "self-hosting" the more expensive parts (e.g, the EC2 parts) to get more for his money. This is great if you feel comfortable sysadmin'ing and dba'ing servers. A lot of people don't feel comfortable doing this and prefer to use ELB instead of HAProxy, RDS instead of DB servers, etc. To each his own.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#23

Post by rjh29 »

threeseed wrote: post #13
rtpg wrote: post #10

Very cool setup. I know it's a bit silly, but anyone building out cloud services should look at this post and think about how easy it is to set up this. This is just slightly more complex than a static site, has a bit of heterogenity, but otherwise is a lot of known tools. Can your stack provide all of this without breaking the bank for the people signing up? Can it be done without having to learn a bunch of bespoke…

> This is just slightly more complex than a static site That's because their product is only slightly more complex than a static site. I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days.

Also pragmatically choosing data centres in one physical location (even though this is a health checking service) rather than immediately going for highly available Aurora Serverless multi-AZ or something that would inflate the bill 10x.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#25

Post by sys42590 »

Hardware redundancy aside (and the good cost efficiency at Hetzner), reading the title, I'm getting the impression, the bus factor at healthchecks.io seems to be 1.

If I'd run a one man show type of business, I'd love to have some kind of plan B in case I'd be incapacitated for more than half a day. THAT would be an interesting read to me.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#26

Post by thejosh »

rtpg wrote: post #10

Very cool setup. I know it's a bit silly, but anyone building out cloud services should look at this post and think about how easy it is to set up this. This is just slightly more complex than a static site, has a bit of heterogenity, but otherwise is a lot of known tools. Can your stack provide all of this without breaking the bank for the people signing up? Can it be done without having to learn a bunch of bespoke…

What happens when the datacenter catches fire? (OVH in 2021).

If you're running a site like this, it's fine to be down for a bit, people will forgive you as you restore from backup (looks like a very solid foundation the site has).

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#27

Post by cuu508 »

sys42590 wrote: post #25

Hardware redundancy aside (and the good cost efficiency at Hetzner), reading the title, I'm getting the impression, the bus factor at healthchecks.io seems to be 1. If I'd run a one man show type of business, I'd love to have some kind of plan B in case I'd be incapacitated for more than half a day. THAT would be an interesting read to me.

Yes, the bus factor is 1, and it's bugging me too. I think any realistic plan B involves expanding the team.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#29

Post by threeseed »

nojito wrote: post #17
threeseed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just slightly more complex than a static site That's because their product is only slightly more complex than a static site. I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days.

Most saas companies are simple crud apps.

No they aren't. Even seemingly basic ones like Notion hide a lot of complexity.

What you're seeing is survivorship bias where the SaaS companies that are doing well are the ones that can provide a simple, clean UI whilst adding the functionality that you need for the product to be useful.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#30

Post by skc »

threeseed wrote: post #13
rtpg wrote: post #10

Very cool setup. I know it's a bit silly, but anyone building out cloud services should look at this post and think about how easy it is to set up this. This is just slightly more complex than a static site, has a bit of heterogenity, but otherwise is a lot of known tools. Can your stack provide all of this without breaking the bank for the people signing up? Can it be done without having to learn a bunch of bespoke…

> This is just slightly more complex than a static site That's because their product is only slightly more complex than a static site. I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days.

> I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days.

I feel like the overwhelming majority of web based software projects can be catered for with exactly this setup.

If it's rare it's because everybody's drunk the Kool-aid

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