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

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

#171

Post by 8fingerlouie »

sigg3 wrote: post #163
8fingerlouie wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 realistical…

Yes, the ROI takes years to achieve but the alternative is to keep throwing money at the power company (and some of that energy will likely be from coal nowadays). Since I bought an electric car I've been drooling over the idea of having the car powered by the sun. I go into the office only on occasion so I don't need to charge fast either. But you need an available roof and an okay topography. But in Scandinavia, I…

> but the alternative is to keep throwing money at the power company (and some of that energy will likely be from coal nowadays).

This is Denmark, where a large part of our power grid is based on renewables, and backup power is based on natural gas. There is no coal involved. When we import power it's from Norway/Sweden or Germany, so either renewables or nuclear. We're not at Norwegian CO2 levels (yet), but it's getting better :)

You can check for yourself here : https://app.electricitymap.org/map

> Since I bought an electric car I've been drooling over the idea of having the car powered by the sun.

Denmark has outlawed sales of new ICE cars from 2030, so at that point solar will make MUCH more sense, as i can charge my car for "free", and the time to ROI will be much shorter.

> But in Scandinavia, I bet most energy goes to heating so improving insulation and adding ground thermal will probably be more efficient.

I thought so to, but currently, in no small part due to the Ukraine situation, lots of people are replacing oil and natural gas heaters with heat pumps or central heating, and the central heating providers are installing large heat pumps as well.

As part as getting a heat pump, my house (built 1970's and renovated 2010's) has a total heat demand of roughly 13000 kWh. Assuming a heat pump with a SCOP of 3.5, that means i will need about 3700 kWh of electricity to heat it, which means that our total electricity consumption ends up around 7500 kWh, so about half the energy (in my case) being used for heating.

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

#172

Post by adrienjarthon »

rdoherty wrote: post #139

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?

In my case (updown.io), I use a "scheduler" process (one per machine) which runs the following loop: every 5 seconds it fetches the checks that needs to execute in the next 5 seconds, ordered by time of run ascending. Then it iterates through them one by one, wait with a small sleep until the precise running time, and then push the job into a background job queue (sidekiq / redis in my case). This allows for a very precise timing of execution even if there is hundreds jobs per seconds, and a good distribution over time (instead of firing 100 jobs every seconds in spikes, it can schedule one every 10ms for example)

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

#173

Post by sdevonoes »

gituliar wrote: post #164
sdevonoes wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My guess: https hits HAProxy from external world, afterwards all is just http. There is no need to encrypt internal trafic.

Sure, but then why use WireGuard to encrypt http internal traffic if one can just let the internal traffic be https :D

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

#174

Post by afroboy »

russellendicott wrote: post #21
rtpg wrote: post #10

Very cool setup. I know it's a bit silly, but anyone building out cloud services should look at this post and think about how easy it is to set up this. This is just slightly more complex than a static site, has a bit of heterogenity, but otherwise is a lot of known tools. Can your stack provide all of this without breaking the bank for the people signing up? Can it be done without having to learn a bunch of bespoke…

To be fair, the author is using several SaaS apps for core parts of his business: monitoring, email, DNS, etc. He's just "self-hosting" the more expensive parts (e.g, the EC2 parts) to get more for his money. This is great if you feel comfortable sysadmin'ing and dba'ing servers. A lot of people don't feel comfortable doing this and prefer to use ELB instead of HAProxy, RDS instead of DB servers, etc. To each his own…

> A lot of people don't feel comfortable doing this and prefer to use ELB instead of HAProxy, RDS instead of DB servers, etc. To each his own.

But you gotta pay more than 500$, way more.

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

#175

Post by capableweb »

exdsq wrote: post #111
capableweb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Now I'm curious, where do people live where it's more common to write software for any type of weapons compared to software for anything not weapons?

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

#176

Post by zerkten »

Destiner wrote: post #123
zerkten wrote: post #88

Earlier 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.

In theory, a one-man business should "abstract as much as possible". In practice, it doesn't work out like this because you are responsible for everything about the business and it's easier to actually operate and maintain the relatively small number of bare-metal servers that run the business. Your advantage as a solo developer is that you can move fast at any time, and it's harder to do when you are encumbered with abstractions. That's not to say build versus buy isn't an evaluation that happens. There are strategic bets, maybe on analytics, or things that help, but aren't core to what you build.

This pattern plays out with many indie app developers as well, both now with iOS apps, and back in the day with Delphi shareware. The cost of taking a dependency on a 3rd party library turns out to be much higher for the solo developer than larger orgs. That's not to say they don't make bets, but they don't build the way that someone at a larger org would do because they have to maintain a higher degree of direct control.

Marco Arment (https://marco.org/) has elaborated a lot on this topic. You can also get a feel for the limits on the upper bounds of his developer experience. Many on HN are not willing to work at a low-level with such boring and dull technologies.

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

#177

Post by matteocontrini »

fasteo wrote: post #41

> HAProxy 2.2 for terminating TLS connections, and load balancing between app servers. Enables easy rolling updates of application servers. Wonder why he is not using hetzner's load balancer [1]. At least cost-wise, the savings are huge (4xAX41-NVME are around 160€; LB31 - the most expensive one - is 36€) [1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/load-balancer

Hetzner's LB doesn't really scale. LB31 should be based on CX31 which is just 2 vCPU compared to the 12 threads of a single AX41 dedicated server.

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

#178

Post by threeseed »

nijave wrote: post #167
threeseed wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the past, sure. But these days people rely far more on their web apps. Having a 1-2 day outage because your architecture is not highly-available across data centres like this one just doesn't cut it. And multi-day outages are very much real because of the thundering herd effect as companies rapidly try to move between data centres exhausting capacity. And much of the complexity in modern day architectures co…

The post mentions he picked multiple Hetzner DCs to put his servers in

Multiple DCs in the same "park" equivalent to an availability zone.

i.e. they would likely be sharing the same power and network infrastructure.

So not redundant by any normal definition.

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

#179

Post by exdsq »

capableweb wrote: post #175
exdsq wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends where you live :)

Now I'm curious, where do people live where it's more common to write software for any type of weapons compared to software for anything not weapons?

I was being a little facetious, but there are some DoD/military industry towns where the majority of code will be C/C++ based stuff.

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

#180

Post by CoolCold »

cuu508 wrote: post #89
CoolCold wrote: post #81

I'd like to here more on your usage of SSLMate and SOPs. For SSLMate I hardly understand what problem it solves (even if we forget about having Let's Encrypt free certs). For SOPs - how it's integrated in your flow. Thanks in advance.

SSLMate it is a certificate reseller with a convenient (for me) interface – a CLI program. It's no fun copy-pasting certificates from email attachments. I'm using both RSA and ECDSA certificates (RSA for compatibility with old clients, ECDSA for efficiency). I'm not sure but looks like ECDSA is not yet generally available from Lets Encrypt. On sops: the secrets (passwords, API keys, access tokens) are sitting in an e…

Thanks for clarification!
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