> Wireguard for private networking between the servers.
I'm curious: doesn't Hetzner provide some sort of private virtual cloud? (Digitalocean calls that VPC)
What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
151–160 of 180 posts
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#152> Elastic Email for sending transactional email.
> Fastmail for sending and receiving support email.
As a SaaS newbie, is it preferred to have two different email providers for transactional and support email? Why wouldn't one use Elastic Email for support email?
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
True. Although more often than not it's the opposite in my experience. Large organizations can afford to spend the money on GCP/aws/Azure and deploy thousands of services. They can also afford the money to hire infrastructure engineers to maintain such services. Also, in large companies everything needs to be implemented "the same way", so no matter if you want to deploy a tiny service or a huge one, you must do it the same way other services in the company are deployed.
Whereas when you are a one-man business, all you have is (free) time and prefer to spend as little money as possible while your business is not profitable. This means: walk away from dedicated databases, managed servers, huge aws bills, etc. You do everything "the old" way: rent a server (bare metal or cloud) and maintain it yourself.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#154> Wireguard for private networking between the servers. I'm curious: doesn't Hetzner provide some sort of private virtual cloud? (Digitalocean calls that VPC)
They do provide private networks now, but AFAIK they didn't in 2017. Today, one could use “vSwitch” or “Cloud Network”, or both, to set up private networking. But, if you want to easily encrypt all traffic, Wireguard might still be a good idea.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#155> Wireguard for private networking between the servers. I'm curious: doesn't Hetzner provide some sort of private virtual cloud? (Digitalocean calls that VPC)
They do provide private networks now, but AFAIK they didn't in 2017. Today, one could use “vSwitch” or “Cloud Network”, or both, to set up private networking. But, if you want to easily encrypt all traffic, Wireguard might still be a good idea.
Good to know.
> But, if you want to easily encrypt all traffic, Wireguard might still be a good idea.
But, if one is already using https I guess encrypting the traffic would be unnecessary, no?
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#156> Elastic Email for sending transactional email. > Fastmail for sending and receiving support email. As a SaaS newbie, is it preferred to have two different email providers for transactional and support email? Why wouldn't one use Elastic Email for support email?
A saas platform usually generates transactional email by calling an http api, and it is usually outgoing-only (smtp). Its not designed for sending ad hoc messages.
Also, transactional email services police their usage to ensure that they are trusted as sources of legitimate bulk email. It would be hard to get away with sending much transactional email via a normal email provider without having your account shut down.
In contrast. Support email is handled by people and is bidirectional and ad-hoc. Fastmail provides smtp/imap/webmail, spam filtering, mailboxes, etc. and is a good match for handling support.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks, I, in fact, did that already, so good to know it is setup.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#158Minor 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…
Seconded. I'd never heard of healthchecks.io and was curious enough to strip off the blog-related parts of the url to get to their main site (not totally trivial on a phone browser).
I almost didnt bother but I'm glad I did because it looks like a really useful service that i might have uses for. I'd assumed that it was a healthcare-related business tbh.
(Also: super-informative post.)
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
I’m not saying it wouldn’t produce energy, and it would probably also contribute most of the year, but the time where I need the most energy (heating and light) is also the time where it is least likely to produce any.
We have an annual power consumption of 6-8k kWh, with about half during winter (heat pump, yay). More energy is required during night time due to dropping temperatures and it being dark, so realistically, I could probably save about half.
At normal energy prices of €0.3/kWh, that means I would save €1200/year, and that’s without taking into account reduced electricity taxes for electric heating.
Taking those into account, all electricity used beyond 4000 kWh/year would be around €0.12/kWh. Taking that into account, I could save €480/year, still assuming I could save 4000 kWh/year out of 8000 total.
A solar panel installation _without_ batteries is about €13500, and saving €480/year means it would take 28 years to get back the investment.
I’m aware batteries can change that equation somewhat in my favor, but it’s ever harder to calculate anything usable with those as it depends if the battery can get charged during the day. In any case, a solar panel installation with batteries is around €20000.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#160> Wireguard for private networking between the servers. I'm curious: doesn't Hetzner provide some sort of private virtual cloud? (Digitalocean calls that VPC)
They do for their cloud instances [0], but not their dedicated server offerings.
I've seen on their custom solutions page [1] you can pay extra to have your own private interconnect or manged switches, but I've never used them nor heard much about them.
[0] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud - see "FEATURES" [1] https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions