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11 years of hosting a SaaS

ghiculescu.substack.com

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#2

Post by jarebear6expepj »

I'm sure its interesting but I am making a conscious choice to not read or linger on user hostile articles. As soon as I want to scroll I am interrupted by a page takeover requiring action and subsequently compelling me to lose interest.

Did you want me to read it or click buttons for you? Too bad your UI gets in the way of the U.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#3

Post by awayto »

> We started on Heroku, because in 2012 if you did any Ruby on Rails tutorial that included deploying your app, you ended up with a Heroku account.

Couldn't be more accurate. Heroku and Rails is almost as much of a throwback as Node and Express. You just had to be there. And it was great. Web dev was always a hobby for me as a teen, but then I turned to the rails book as a means of learning a professionally designed system, when I wanted to get serious as a dev. It definitely served me well. Heroku, at the time, offered a very streamlined and accessible way to integrate rails. It was a great time to learn.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#5

Post by ghiculescu »

esafak wrote: post #4

So what are the new Herokus? What do you recommended for starting a serious project? AWS AppRunner? How about something open source?

fly.io is the least bad.

But honestly nothing these days is as good as Heroku was 10 years ago, if you just want to put something online and don't care how it gets there.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#6

Post by irsagent »

A recent observation, and this could be a biased one, you mentioned:

> we’ve spent a bit of time learning more about moving off the cloud to a managed data center. But the nice thing is not feeling like we need to.

That SaaS's are moving/thinking/completed to running their own infustructure away from managed services like digital ocean and aws, like 37Signal(Basecamp & Hey).

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#7

Post by babyshake »

ghiculescu wrote: post #5
esafak wrote: post #4

So what are the new Herokus? What do you recommended for starting a serious project? AWS AppRunner? How about something open source?

fly.io is the least bad. But honestly nothing these days is as good as Heroku was 10 years ago, if you just want to put something online and don't care how it gets there.

Vercel for serverless apps is very easy to do.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#10

Post by aetherspawn »

Would be interested to know what your hosting bill was like?

We recently moved everything in-house and started hosting our own servers. Having physical access to the machine (and the network HW) pretty much eliminated all of our dev ops (1). We expected the HW to fail often and such, but in 2 years the only maintenance we had to do was add more disks to the RAID array and resize the partition a few times. Even though we have redundant everything, nothing has ever failed and the server has never gone offline (except when it reboots every Sunday @ 3AM in a min or two).

(1): How? Well instead of running small containers/micro boxes/services that we could scale up and down, since we owned the hardware it meant that efficient utilization wasn't a requirement for us anymore. We don't really care how much we utilize our own HW, so we just smooshed everything onto huge VMs in two huge 100 core boxes with affectionate names. We used super basic networking features (VLANs, firewall port forward) to setup the network. To simplify dev ops even further, there is only access to the servers from specific ethernet ports in the building.

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