Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.healthchecks.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 180 posts

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

#121

Post by sokoloff »

trvz wrote: post #55
8fingerlouie wrote: post #43

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…

> 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.

> this waste of electricity is very selfish considering climate change

Moving yourself to the summer house every two weeks probably has far more climate impact than the fridge.

Taking to a logical conclusion: you shouldn’t have a summer house at all. (That’s not a position that I hold, but one that seems more logical than “have a summer house; just empty out and unplug the fridge while you’re not there…”)

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

#122

Post by wildmanx »

mlyle wrote: post #117
lazide wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

As a counter argument, imagine an infinitely good insulation and 0 standby power (and a spherical cow inside, for illustration purposes). Then keeping it "running" is clearly better than letting the fridge warm up since power draw is 0 in the former case. Obviously the conditions are not as perfect, but with a very modern fridge, maybe you get sufficiently close that keeping running indeed is superior.

I'm not arguing that that's the case here. I'm arguing that you don't "always" expect things to be worse off letting it run. There is a threshold, when approaching the mentioned fantasy conditions, beyond which letting it run may be better.

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

#123

Post by Destiner »

zerkten wrote: post #88
CoolCold wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I observe, developer prefer to stay in API abstractions than spending time on servers/other infrastructure. Partially I can understand their choice.

What do you mean? The economics and decision-making are different between one-person companies through small and large organizations. When you have to know to to do everything, and fix anything, it is a problem when there is complexity, and you lack control. As organizations get larger, there is more value from abstractions and more leeway for their use. In many ways it is a luxury to be able to use said abstractions…

I believe it’s the opposite? In a large org, you can have a dedicate team managing your servers. When you’re a one man business, you want to abstract as much as possible to focus on value proposition.

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

#124

Post by altdataseller »

hakube wrote: post #91
altdataseller wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fancy devops/containers tooling is easier to maintain and work on vs running on bare metal servers.

It's not easy to maintain I can tell you

I said easier, not easy.

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

#125

Post by curun1r »

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.

I think you and the people disagreeing with you are both right, in a sense. These tools can absolutely simplify and improve even a small deployment…for someone with significant experience using them. But there’s a lot of learning that has to happen to get to that level of experience. And for a solo operator or small team without that experience, investing that time into learning may not be the best investment.

You see this contextual disagreement a ton here on HN. Those who gave taken the time to learn these tools and have practical experience using them for real deployments see the alternative as primitive, error prone and fundamentally limiting. Those without the experience see the tools as overly-complex distractions. Both are true, depending on your situation. Like almost all tech decisions, there are no universally correct answers. The best decisions are those tailored to the specific circumstances.

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

#126

Post by BilalBudhani »

One thing I just realise is OP can replace

> HAProxy

> NGINX

> SSLMate

with Caddy [0] which would reduce the number of dependencies and complexity involve in infra.

I've been using Caddy for a very long time now and it has been working out so well.

[0] https://caddyserver.com

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

#128

Post by bckygldstn »

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 run a one-person load-balanced SaaS on Hetzner. In the 2 years since I started I've had no customer-facing outages.

Over the same period, I think there's been two outages of AWS us-east-1 and a multi-region GCP outage. Plus weekly outages of a grownup unicorn SaaS like github or slack.

It's a tradeoff: the simplicity of such a setup reduces outage risk, and the costs saved can be spent on monitoring tools or extra redundancy.

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

#129

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

tpetry wrote: post #85
piccachew wrote: post #24

I wonder how much time do you need to spend in order to maintain such infrastructure?

With ubuntu and the automatic security updates you don‘t have to spend any time maintaining it. I haven‘t done anything in months, the system is applying security updates automatically.

Is this on by default? I just installed Ubuntu 22 in a new VPS and was just thinking about this.

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

#130

Post by sigg3 »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #77
wildmanx wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" tim…

As a Norwegian looking into solar for my garage, all the products available now produce power when it's cloudy, snowy, rainy etc.

First Google result: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/busted-common-sol...

Post reply on HN