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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

#131

Post by 8fingerlouie »

mlyle wrote: post #116
8fingerlouie wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It does sound like a lot, and I’ve only measured once.

The fridge is in a cabinet, enclosed on 3 sides, so maybe it’s not letting enough hot air out ?

I could be wrong, but I think it was stated as using 184 kWh / year (at room temp 22C, optimal conditions), which is just over 0.5 kWh/day, and considering that the summerhouse is usually cooler than that (12-16C) when unoccupied, I would assume it used even less power.

As it is, for this entire week, the heat pump has (self) reported using 1.8 kWh/day, and according to my power company, my daily consumption has been 1.8 kWh/day. Considering that there are 5-7 IoT things plugged in, the fridge probably isn’t using much power.

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

#132

Post by cuu508 »

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.

About a month ago Hetzner was hit by an UDP DDOS, and as a mitigation they throttled UDP traffic on specific port ranges.

This caused major problems for Healthchecks, as I'm using Wireguard for private networking, and Wireguard uses UDP. Here's a postmortem about this incident: https://status.healthchecks.io/en/incidents/dcbcDNd89LptHoWi...

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

#133

Post by ddorian43 »

BilalBudhani wrote: post #126

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

He can replace them with NGINX too I believe.

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

#134

Post by therealdrag0 »

skc wrote: post #30
threeseed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just slightly more complex than a static site That's because their product is only slightly more complex than a static site. I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days.

> I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days. I feel like the overwhelming majority of web based software projects can be catered for with exactly this setup. If it's rare it's because everybody's drunk the Kool-aid

Majority by what metric? Solo projects? Enterprise? What? That’s an incredibly broad brush that doesn’t match my experience at all. Could it be you just haven’t been involved in many complicated projects?

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

#135

Post by BilalBudhani »

ddorian43 wrote: post #133
BilalBudhani wrote: post #126

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

He can replace them with NGINX too I believe.

NGINX doesn't have first class support for auto generating SSL, you would still have to rely on third party service/dependency for that.

Whereas, with Caddy you would solve all 3 problems with single tool.

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

#136

Post by xuki »

Mo3 wrote: post #110
welterde wrote: post #108

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…

> uses consumer hardware

I run dedicated servers at Hetzner and the consumer parts are CPU and motherboard. Memory is ECC, NVMe SSDs are data center grade. How often do you see CPU failure?

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

#137

Post by BilalBudhani »

altdataseller wrote: post #124
hakube wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easy to maintain I can tell you

I said easier, not easy.

I don't see how it is easier to maintain.

I follow a simple rule of thumb - the more abstractions you introduce the more complex it gets to maintain

Life is easier if you can get away with lesser abstractions.

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

#138

Post by dmje »

Minor usability suggestion that literally no one will likely care about but I notice it all the time:

If you're writing a blog post about your service then chances are you're interested in driving people to the main website about that service?

So...make it easy for those potential users to get there. At the top of your blog have a prominent "what is [service]" link to the marketing home / about page or a call out box.

This guy does it as a CTA after the post which is a start but many, many people don't. That then leaves me and other potential users to have to figure out how to get to the homepage. I'll do it but you'll lose many others.

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

#140

Post by mardix »

BilalBudhani wrote: post #126

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

(Shameless plug)

Here's a tiny PAAS that can be used if Caddy is too complex.

https://github.com/mardix/sailor

Sailor is a tiny PaaS to install on your servers/VPS that uses git push to deploy micro-apps, micro-services, sites with SSL, on your own servers or VPS.

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