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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

#71

Post by Nextgrid »

thejosh wrote: post #26
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).

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

He has daily backups for that reason - those can be changed to hourly or even every 15-mins if needed.

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

#72

Post by wildmanx »

dpcx wrote: post #64
trvz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While I agree with the overall sentiment (fix the big problems first to maximize payoff), the issue is one of attitude. Keeping a "save where possible" mindset, no matter how large the immediate payoff (within reasonable limits) has a much greater chance of success.

You have that effect in many areas of life. A quite obvious example is working out. Of course it won't make much of a difference if you skip today's workout or abort your 40 min run today halfway cause you don't feel like it. But it's the mindset/attitude. It makes you a quitter. It enables you to do the same thing again. And again. And in the end, the cumulative damage of the change in mindset is magnitudes worse than the single event.

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

#73

Post by stavros »

finnlab wrote: post #56
stavros wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it for the same purpose as well, a friend left on a trip and his fridge lost power, spoiling thousands of dollars worth of his small baking business materials. I set up a phone with Tasker, if the phone stops charging or fails to check in, it sends an alert. Luckily, and as you say, monitoring changed the situation, as it never failed since.

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!

Pipe down, Farnsworth!

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

#74

Post by 8fingerlouie »

wildmanx wrote: post #70
8fingerlouie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) understa…

> 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..

Normal power consumption of it (assuming 18C room temperature) is less than 0.4 kWh/day. That amounts to 4.8 kWh in a 12 day period. Cooling it down from 18C takes 5.6 kWh (measured).

Temperature varies of course, and the lower the temperature the lower the power consumption, and the heat pump keeps a minimum temperature of 12C. During long summer days, the indoor temperature can easily reach 26C, which will require more power, and i have not measured every possible scenario.

I'm not ruling out that actually cooling down the thing during winter will require less energy than keeping it running, but i'm fairly certain that doing the same from 26C will require more power than keeping it running.

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

#76

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

altdataseller wrote: post #67
BilalBudhani wrote: post #7

I'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.

Is that some kind of universal truth or just what you think

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

#77

Post by 8fingerlouie »

wildmanx wrote: post #72
dpcx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree with the overall sentiment (fix the big problems first to maximize payoff), the issue is one of attitude. Keeping a "save where possible" mindset, no matter how large the immediate payoff (within reasonable limits) has a much greater chance of success. You have that effect in many areas of life. A quite obvious example is working out. Of course it won't make much of a difference if you skip today's work…

> Keeping a "save where possible" mindset, no matter how large the immediate payoff (within reasonable limits) has a much greater chance of success.

Ironically that is what kept me from setting up solar power. Being in Scandinavia, solar has a somewhat limited potential given that days are 7 hours long during winter, and December often has less than 20 hours of sunshine in total. My calculations for the "payback" time of the solar panels said that _MAYBE_ they would have saved something before their "expiry date" some 20 years into the future.

Considering the "energy and material waste" involved in creating solar panels, this task can be handled by energy companies much more efficiently than i ever can.

I am still considering a share in a windmill though :)

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

#78

Post by tpetry »

thejosh wrote: post #26
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).

His servers are distributed over multiple datacenters at the Falkenstein location of hetzner.

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

#79

Post by dolmen »

altdataseller wrote: post #67
BilalBudhani wrote: post #7

I'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.

When there are just 9 servers and a single developer like in the article your opinion doesn't matter.

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

#80

Post by toqy »

exdsq wrote: post #44
capableweb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days. Is it? What functionality are you thinking about that absolutely require more than that? I find that most ideas even today can be solved with a web server + DB, while developers today like to over-engineer things and think about scaling a service for a million users while they haven't even figured out the value propositi…

If you’re programming autonomous weapons for fighter jets it tends to require a little more than a web server, or so I’ve heard!

I fail to see how AWS helps with that though
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