91–100 of 180 posts
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.
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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…
At my last job we had one of those hyperfancy devops setups with all the fancy devops tools. Literally no one in the company knew how to spin up a new environment. I'm not exaggerating: no one knew how to run a dev environment and when they had to set up a new region for legal purposes it took weeks for the team. All of that was initially set up in an age of legends in the mythical past of a year and a half ago.
Theoretically it would all failover and scale to the moon and back. Emphasis on theoretically because no one seemed to understand how it all worked, so who knows how well it would behave when it failed. There was actually some major downtime in my time there which was rationalized away as "growing pains", but in in my opinion a major factor was just that no one really understood how it al worked.
If something goes wrong with a simple system then often the diagnosis and fix is simple (in this case: just deploy a new environment). If something goes wrong with a complex system then all of this is much harder.
Not saying you can't use these tools correctly or that there isn't an appropriate use for it, but it's a good case study on how the complexity can spin out of control if you're not careful in how you apply it.
So by the time your browser requests an API call to a Hetzner server, there is a 100~170ms overhead. Compare that to a hosting provider that has datacenters in US West and Asia
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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…
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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…
In my experience, anyway.
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> 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" tim…
This isn't the same thing - you've actually calculated that you're unlikely to save in this situation. You made a sensible decision that the payback period is so long for your own uses that it runs the risk of not actually paying back/being beneficial. The "save where possible" mindset would be more like "I calculated it would be better, but my impact is less than my workplace doing X, so I won't". Everyone should be…
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> 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…
I started leaving a gallon jug of water (frozen) in mine as it helps give it enough thermal mass to even out the spikes.
My chest freezer maxes out at 180 watts TDP for instance, which is pretty anemic if you’re trying to freeze a pot of room temperature stew.
my concerns for using Hetzner is the latency. Servers are cheap but they are located in Scandinavia or Germany. So by the time your browser requests an API call to a Hetzner server, there is a 100~170ms overhead. Compare that to a hosting provider that has datacenters in US West and Asia
The hardware used is consumer hardware too.
This is literally the opposite of what I would expect for a SaaS with uptime requirement... I feel like OP/the developers behind this might have made a really terrible choice and could be paying more in manpower than the savings they have by using a budget server discounter
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Hetzner, but this seems like an unfit usecase. This is literally what you use cloud platforms for..
I 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…