Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.healthchecks.io

111–120 of 180 posts

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

#111
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Well, I'd say it's more rare to work on autonomous weapons for fighter jets than not, wouldn't you agree?

Depends where you live :)

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

#112
post #65

Great 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 configuratio…

Thanks for taking the time to respond!

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

#113
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The article explicitly said the servers are scattered across the various datacenters at the Falkenstein location - ergo not single-dc. Now you can argue about the amount of shared fate, but they are separate buildings and hetzner lists them as separate datacenters [0].

[0] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-con...

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

#114
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The article explicitly said the servers are scattered across the various datacenters at the Falkenstein location - ergo not single-dc. Now you can argue about the amount of shared fate, but they are separate buildings and hetzner lists them as separate datacenters [0]. [0] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-con...

Lol... okay, point taken, single-location.

Not going to argue about the shared fate, as I've seen more outages than not affecting whole locations..

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

#115
post #32

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…

Why uWSGI? Every time I've talked to someone who uses it and got them to try gunicorn they've seen quite big performance improvement for no code change and switched.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 temperat…

> Cooling it down from 18C takes 5.6 kWh

This seems like a lot. It's 20 megajoules, so even at a COP of 1, it's enough energy to cool down 20 megajoules / (4182 J/kg/K) / 18 K = 265 kilos of water by 18 kelvin.

And a refrigerator is supposed to attain a COP better than 1, and I suspect you have less thermal mass around than 265 kilos of water.

Something is wrong-- either in measurement, or heat exchangers very badly occluded by dust, etc, or some other fault.

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

#117
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Insulation can be really good now a days.

You would always expect to be better off letting the refrigerator warm up, because:

* Every bit of warming that finds its way into a powered-off refrigerator is heat the refrigerator would need to take out anyways. And the heat flowing in declines as the inside warms up.

* There's standby power, etc.

* A refrigerator is expected to be more efficient removing heat when the temperature difference between inside and outside is less.

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

#118
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The article explicitly said the servers are scattered across the various datacenters at the Falkenstein location - ergo not single-dc. Now you can argue about the amount of shared fate, but they are separate buildings and hetzner lists them as separate datacenters [0]. [0] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-con...

im curious as to why they dont have US West, Central, Asia data centers. Even with a US West, Central offering they could really do a number with their pricing discounts.

even better if they offer Singapore & Tokyo.

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

#119

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…

Sounds like a win-win to me. Either you installing the thing alerts you to the problem, or instslling it makes the whole problem disappear. Either way it’ll be fixed.

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

#120

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

Hetzner has a datacenter in Ashburn, VA nowadays as well: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/
Post reply on HN