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

blog.healthchecks.io

141–150 of 180 posts

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

#141

This is fascinating. I am curious how sites like this (and others such as Pingdom, 'up time' checkers, etc) handle scheduled tasks that have to run at high frequencies? Cron on one machine? Celery beat?

Healthchecks runs a loop of

10 send any due notifications

20 SLEEP 2

30 GOTO 10

The actual loop [1] is of course a little more complicated, and is being run concurrently on several machines.

[1] https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/blob/09a99d3e9c...

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

#142
post #140

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.

Sailor looks really cool! Just took a peak at the codebase and it already seems very interesting compared to other self hosting PaaS solutions.

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

#143
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arguin…

> imagine an infinitely good insulation

Then it would never warm up, and at this limit the two cases are equivalent (powered and unpowered).

> when approaching the mentioned fantasy conditions, beyond which letting it run may be better.

Anywhere short of the limit, what I said holds. Anything better than infinite insulation, I don't know how to reason about.

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

#144
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

But the winter lodge isnt really that nice in summer.

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

#145
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Seems likely. Once it succeeds in warming its cabinet, a big share of that heat leaks back into the fridge. (And efficiency falls because of the bigger temperature difference).

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

#146
post #138

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…

Indeed it's very annoying when company blogs have their logo or homepage nav link go to the blog's home page instead of their main landing page.

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

#147
post #127
post #39

I notice the author is using Braintree for payments. Is it a good option for accepting payments from global audiences?

I'm also curious why this over stripe?

When I started, Stripe was not yet available in my country, Latvia (it now is).

Personally I've had good experience with Braintree. Particularly their support has been impressively good – they take time to respond, but you can tell the support agents have deep knowledge of their system, they have access to tools to troubleshoot problems, and they don't hesitate to escalate to engineering.

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

#148
post #99

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…

Consumer hardware is totally fine if you use multiple machines - the probability of them failing at the exact same time is very low.

His stack already uses multiple appservers (so the loss of one wouldn't even be noticeable) and has a manual way of failing over to a DB replica.

It's often cheaper to work around node failures (which you often need to do for other reasons anyway - DC-wide outage, etc) than have more reliable nodes.

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

#149
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See https://askubuntu.com/a/204 - also applies to Debian (and most likely other derivatives) too.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hetzner has built a DC in the US East where they currently offer their cloud products:

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

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