You should consider backblaze for backups it is much less expensive and has an s3 compatible api…
What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
61–70 of 180 posts
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#62> HAProxy 2.2 for terminating TLS connections, and load balancing between app servers. Enables easy rolling updates of application servers. Wonder why he is not using hetzner's load balancer [1]. At least cost-wise, the savings are huge (4xAX41-NVME are around 160€; LB31 - the most expensive one - is 36€) [1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/load-balancer
That product has a serious lack of docs, and I know from experience some off-cloud vendor balancers have crappy architectures with low overall throughput limits. Their product could be a shared CPU VPS under the hood or something deeply baked into their network architecture, guilty until proven innocent
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#63I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…
> i very much fear arriving at a summer house where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks.
Another solution to this problem is to just empty the fridge and turn it off while not in the summer house for a few weeks.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#64I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…
> i very much fear arriving at a summer house where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks. Usually there's little any single person can do, but this waste of electricity is very selfish considering climate change.
Compared to the office buildings leaving their entire office illuminated all night even though the parking lot is empty, this is less than miniscule. In the grand scheme of things, yes, it matters. But start with the big fish and you'll be less hungry.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#65Great write up. I would love to hear more detail how WireGuard is setup.
I use vanilla Wireguard (the "wg" command and the "wg-quick" service). I set up new hosts and update peer configuration using Fabric tasks. It may sound messy, but works fine in practice. For example, to set up Wireguard on a new host:
* On the new host, I run a Fabric task which generates a key pair and spits out the public key. The private key never leaves the server.
* I paste the public key in a peer configuration template.
* On every host that must be able to contact the new host, I run another Fabric task which updates the peer configuration from the template ("wg syncconf").
One thing to watch out is any services that bind to the Wireguard network interface. I had to make sure on reboot they start after wg-quick.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#66I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…
> i very much fear arriving at a summer house where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks. Another solution to this problem is to just empty the fridge and turn it off while not in the summer house for a few weeks.
We don't keep easily perishable goods in there like meat or vegetables, but some of them does require cooling to stay fresh.
> just empty the fridge and turn it off while not in the summer house for a few weeks
We tried that, but the fridge uses 6-8 hours to reach target temperature despite being brand new, and keeping food fresh without cooling for 10 hours is not easy.
It actually uses less power being powered on continiously for 2 weeks (12 days from departure to arrival), than it does being powered off and working overtime for 6 hours trying to cool down. It's not much less power, but still less.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#67I'm someone who likes configuring & running my own servers, it is always a pleasure reading how others small / solo businesses are running their show. It is so cool to see one-person SaaS business running on old school bare metal servers without needing any fancy devOps / containerize tooling.
That fancy devops/containers tooling is easier to maintain and work on vs running on bare metal servers.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#68I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…
> i very much fear arriving at a summer house where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks. Usually there's little any single person can do, but this waste of electricity is very selfish considering climate change.
Define waste.
We tested it, and with our usual usage pattern of using the summerhouse every 2 weeks, the brand new fridge uses less power while powered for the 12 days between departure and arrival, than it does cooling down when powered on at arrival.
Despite being brand new, it uses 6-8 hours to get from 18C to 5C. I guess because it's brand new it is well insulated, so less cooling power is needed once it's cooled down, which translates to a weaker compressor with less power consumption.
As for the Raspberry Pi, it runs idle for 99% of the time, consuming _at most_ 1.15W. That amounts to 0.8 kWh in a month, which is about as much as a TV uses in 2.5 hours, or about a quarter the power consumption of a Sonos One Speaker sitting idle [1].
The total power consumption of the summerhouse uninhabited is ~1.8kWh/day, which includes the heat pump, fridge, internet modem and router, Raspberry Pi, Security Camera and a couple of hubs for IoT.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#69Very 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).
The nice bit about this is, that you can deploy the same thing everywhere.
on other bare metals, or on AWS, azure, ...
As long as you have database backup, git code, and build-scripts.
I run something similar (although smaller). My disaster recovery is: I have everything prepared, to go on AWS, if necessary. Would take less, than 1 hr to be back up (database size being the biggest time sink). If I wanted to minimize that time, I could have small DB replica running, so I would just have to run last day of wall files. But for my purposes everything less than a day is good enough.
And then you can take a few days, to find something cheaper, to migrate to.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> i very much fear arriving at a summer house where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks. Another solution to this problem is to just empty the fridge and turn it off while not in the summer house for a few weeks.
We don't keep easily perishable goods in there like meat or vegetables, but some of them does require cooling to stay fresh. > just empty the fridge and turn it off while not in the summer house for a few weeks We tried that, but the fridge uses 6-8 hours to reach target temperature despite being brand new, and keeping food fresh without cooling for 10 hours is not easy. It actually uses less power being powered on c…
> It actually uses less power being powered on continiously for 2 weeks (12 days from departure to arrival), than it does being powered off and working overtime for 6 hours trying to cool down. It's not much less power, but still less.
I suppose you mean energy rather than power? (Cause the argument makes less sense with power.)
That's an interesting phenomenon then since it goes counter to my (rather naive) understanding of physics. There could be some anomaly with the fridges efficiency curve that causes this. Maybe it's really inefficient cooling down the contents from room temperature while being really efficient maintaining the cool temp? After all, the latter is its main purpose..