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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

#101

Post by upupandup »

Mo3 wrote: post #99
upupandup wrote: post #93

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

Not only that. It's single-DC, and Hetzner is somewhat known for having serious DC-wide network failures from time to time. 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 bu…

I didn't know that thanks for sharing. Has there been major cases recently?

really puzzling that a healthcheck provider itself is not accounting for this potential issue.

Is there some sort of edgy reverse proxy here? Doesn't seem like it. Even then there would be a big latency.

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

#102

Post by Mo3 »

upupandup wrote: post #101
Mo3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that. It's single-DC, and Hetzner is somewhat known for having serious DC-wide network failures from time to time. 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 bu…

I didn't know that thanks for sharing. Has there been major cases recently? really puzzling that a healthcheck provider itself is not accounting for this potential issue. Is there some sort of edgy reverse proxy here? Doesn't seem like it. Even then there would be a big latency.

https://status.hetzner.com/

We haven't been using them for anything in production, so I am not 100% sure - they have a backbone outage right now however..

There are no edge / reverse proxies being described in the OP article, just a HAProxy configuration within the same DC.

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

#103

Post by upupandup »

Mo3 wrote: post #102
upupandup wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know that thanks for sharing. Has there been major cases recently? really puzzling that a healthcheck provider itself is not accounting for this potential issue. Is there some sort of edgy reverse proxy here? Doesn't seem like it. Even then there would be a big latency.

https://status.hetzner.com/ We haven't been using them for anything in production, so I am not 100% sure - they have a backbone outage right now however.. There are no edge / reverse proxies being described in the OP article, just a HAProxy configuration within the same DC.

interesting....im also concerned that with the recent geopolitical developments, Hetzner could already be at crosshairs

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

#104

Post by Mo3 »

upupandup wrote: post #103
Mo3 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://status.hetzner.com/ We haven't been using them for anything in production, so I am not 100% sure - they have a backbone outage right now however.. There are no edge / reverse proxies being described in the OP article, just a HAProxy configuration within the same DC.

interesting....im also concerned that with the recent geopolitical developments, Hetzner could already be at crosshairs

In case you are talking about potential DDoS attacks, yes, they have been hit hard by massive attacks the last few weeks.

They also do not have adequate protection systems in place

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

#105

Post by GZJOHN »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #68
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.

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…

> Define waste.

Owning a "summer" house?

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

#106

Post by dubbel »

cuu508 wrote: post #32
tothrowaway wrote: post #12

Can you share more details about what the 4 HAProxy servers are doing? I run a SaaS too, but on a single beefy machine handling web and DB stuff. I'm curious what I'm missing out on not using HAProxy in front.

To answer the question of why four of them: * the traffic from the monitored systems comes with spikes. Looking at netdata graphs, currently the baseline is 600 requests/s, but there is a 2000 requests/s spike every minute, and 4000 requests/s spike every 10 minutes. * want to maintain redundancy and capacity even when a load balancer is removed from DNS rotation (due to network problems, or for upgrade) There are sp…

Damn, I never thought about it, but I guess the next cron/scheduling system should really be configurable down to the second, and if it is not defined set a random value between 0-59 seconds as a default. That might make the entire internet traffic and global compute use less spiky.

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

#107

Post by holoduke »

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.

The more tools you have the more difficult it is to maintain yourself. In a larger team with dedicated DevOps you might be right. But in my case where I maintain frontend, backend, databases, security, hosting and the servers I cannot have too much complexity. And i find container tools too complex to fully understand as a full stack software developer (not an expert in anything). Same for heavy weight frontend or backend frameworks. I like to keep it simple without too many abstractions on all layers. So far I managed to build apps used by millions of daily users for about 10 years.

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

#108

Post by welterde »

Mo3 wrote: post #99
upupandup wrote: post #93

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

Not only that. It's single-DC, and Hetzner is somewhat known for having serious DC-wide network failures from time to time. 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 bu…

It's not single-DC (since they have multiple locations and multiple datacenters at those locations), but they are a single provider. However AWS is also a single provider. And as Facebook and large ISPs have demonstrated recently-ish, having a global footprint does not mean you cannot break everything at the same time in interesting ways anyway. Only way around this is to go with multiple vendors, but now whatever you build to use them at the same time/fail over between them will be the weakest link.

Hetzner also offers server-grade hardware btw. But if your setup is fully redundant anyway it doesn't really matter anymore if it's consumer grade or not (which the setup described in the article is).

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

#109

Post by avrionov »

cuu508 wrote: post #35
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #31

What volume of data are you storing in postgres? Any reason not to use a hosted postgres provider? At first glance it seems like a lot of compute for the service but curious about scale

Around 200 write tx/s as a baseline. Spikes to 2000 write tx/s at the start of every minute, and 4000 write tx/s every 10 minutes. > Any reason not to use a hosted postgres provider? * Cost * Schrems II * From what I remember, both Google Cloud SQL and AWS RDS used to have mandatory maintenance windows. The fail-over was not instant, so there was some unavoidable downtime every month. This was a while ago – maybe it…

I don't think that this will work differently than you manually updating your databases. GCP claims that maintenance downtime is less than 60 seconds.

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

#110

Post by Mo3 »

welterde wrote: post #108
Mo3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that. It's single-DC, and Hetzner is somewhat known for having serious DC-wide network failures from time to time. 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 bu…

It's not single-DC (since they have multiple locations and multiple datacenters at those locations), but they are a single provider. However AWS is also a single provider. And as Facebook and large ISPs have demonstrated recently-ish, having a global footprint does not mean you cannot break everything at the same time in interesting ways anyway. Only way around this is to go with multiple vendors, but now whatever yo…

We are discussing the service described in the article linked to with this post, which

1) runs single-DC 2) uses consumer hardware

I agree on the notion that with redundancy it is not as important what kind of hardware is used, but it still is something to consider (seeing how this is a one-person venture and server outages are still a huge time-sink), and I wouldn't even necessarily speak about true redundancy in this case

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