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11 years of hosting a SaaS

ghiculescu.substack.com

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#11

Post by ghiculescu »

aetherspawn wrote: post #10

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…

It's around 150k USD/month at the moment.

Would love to learn more about your setup. Email me if you're interested in chatting. Email in my profile.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#12

Post by rozenmd »

> Use managed services for as long as possible

Big agree here.

Yes, you can save stupid money by handrolling postgres on an extremely beefy Hetzner server, or you can pay someone else and keep building your product: https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-dec...

This isn't to say, "don't bother learning how to do it yourself", but more "learn to pick your battles".

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#13

Post by Nicholas_C »

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?

I see Render being mentioned on HN quite a bit as the new Heroku. I’m still using Heroku for my personal projects but have been meaning to check Render out.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#14

Post by ksajadi »

the progression from Heroku to AWS is very common as SaaS businesses grow. However one thing that’s missing from all “alternatives to Heroku” is what I call life after deployment or Day-2 operations. Many solutions show you a sleek demo of how easily you can deploy a Hello World app to their platform but leave you in a straight jacket when it the app is deployed and you need tools to keep it running, like changing an Nginx (or equivalent) setting or using persistent storage or a Postgres contrib.

Making decisions about infrastructure is as much about day-2 as it is about the initial deployment. I see fly.io and render in this camp. Shiny day-1 docs and demos and then wishing you good luck when you need a `rails c` to see something in the DB

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#15

Post by SenHeng »

awayto wrote: post #3

> 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…

I sometimes wonder how my career (and life) would've differed if 11 years ago, I had chosen to learn rails instead of laravel because of familiarity with php via Wordpress. From there it went on to C# (windows), JS (frontend), scala/go/node.js backend + JS front end. Lots of JS.

Here being Japan, there were a lot of opportunities to pick up ruby/rails along the way but I stuck on the JS trajectory partially because I didn't want to 'start over' with rails _now_. There were only a few times when not knowing ruby/rails meant I was limited to specific tasks so it was never really career limiting. It did mean that I actively avoided working in ruby shops, for better or worse.

If I had picked rails instead then, would I have transitioned into more of a backend engineer with some frontend duties instead of the reverse?

Not that it matters, but there definitely is a tendency in our industry to 'look down' on frontenders as not real engineers and thus not consider them for leadership positions.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#16

Post by drawkbox »

awayto wrote: post #3

> 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…

> Node and Express. You just had to be there. And it was great.

I agree and Node and Express are still great when going with just js. Node and Koa more now but still great. Socket.io for real-time. All are great for getting things up quickly, simple and shipping things.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#17

Post by Radim »

rozenmd wrote: post #12

> Use managed services for as long as possible Big agree here. Yes, you can save stupid money by handrolling postgres on an extremely beefy Hetzner server, or you can pay someone else and keep building your product: https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-dec... This isn't to say, "don't bother learning how to do it yourself", but more "learn to pick your battles".

It may be a generational thing, a matter of familiarity with computing and computers. For someone who's lived through the 80s, "handrolling postgres" doesn't sound nearly as scary as you imagine.

I expect the cost/benefit analysis of "handrolling postgres on a beefy Hetzner server" vs "navigating the menus and options of AWS services" would be different for different teams.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#18

Post by awayto »

drawkbox wrote: post #16
awayto wrote: post #3

> 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…

> Node and Express. You just had to be there. And it was great. I agree and Node and Express are still great when going with just js. Node and Koa more now but still great. Socket.io for real-time. All are great for getting things up quickly, simple and shipping things.

For sure. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Node and express are still great. I still use them. Heroku and rails would still be great to this day, too.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#19

Post by erhaetherth »

SenHeng wrote: post #15
awayto wrote: post #3

> 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…

I sometimes wonder how my career (and life) would've differed if 11 years ago, I had chosen to learn rails instead of laravel because of familiarity with php via Wordpress. From there it went on to C# (windows), JS (frontend), scala/go/node.js backend + JS front end. Lots of JS. Here being Japan, there were a lot of opportunities to pick up ruby/rails along the way but I stuck on the JS trajectory partially because I…

> Not that it matters, but there definitely is a tendency in our industry to 'look down' on frontenders as not real engineers and thus not consider them for leadership positions.

I think that's funny because there some to be a ton of backenders that can't do frontend at all. And then they want to look down on FE when they can't do it themselves? It's not just basic HTML and CSS if you're building a complex app.

I do both (FE & BE) so... I've seen it all and enjoy it all. Not sure one is easier than the other.

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