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11 years of hosting a SaaS

ghiculescu.substack.com

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#21

Post by erhaetherth »

Radim wrote: post #17
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.

I've been on unmanaged MySQL for ~8 years now. Considered switching to managed but I'm not seeing any performance or stability issues, so I guess I'll just keep this train going until it craps out on me, then restore a backup onto a managed service, say sorry for the downtime, and that'll be that.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#22

Post by drawkbox »

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".

Yes especially data, simplicity is key as well.

Where possible go with simple but abstracted cloud storage, cloud tables and then a cloud db that is managed. We use Azure mostly right now but our storage system works across Azure storage, Amazon S3, Google Cloud and others. For tables, Azure Tables mainly. For database with filtering/paging better performant and ACID compliant cloud db, CosmosDB currently which is a dream with the differing apis (SQL, Mongo, Cassandra, Tables style). The more you can avoid vendor or dev-lockin the better so simple formats/messaging/routing and abstracted specifics/implementations.

When you store data in storage or a cloud db the scaling is "infinite" and you can also snapshot or backup to anther one, you never worry about data.

The front ends and APIs are mostly repos pushed to app/web services and everything else in data storage. Super simple and anywhere you need some special service that can be serverless or a dedicated setup, like maybe a RDBMS, chat server, network server or WebRTC/socket endpoint that interacts with the simple side. These managed as well if possible, though not always. Additionally, build cheap and horizontal scaling on web/real-time servers. Vertical scaling and sharding is for suckers.

Side note: CosmosDB is like a combination of NoSQL, document databases and GraphQL and it is ACID compliant and you can do REST or SQL, it can even wrap MongoDB and Cassandra and make them ACID compliant. It really feels like the best way. Not many have all that and ACID compliant. Not even Amazon Redshift has that, DynamoDB does if specified. Google Firestore does if specified. I used to be big on RDMBS Oracle then MSSQL then PostgreSQL and those are great for backing/reporting etc but CosmosDB combines all the power of RDMBS, NoSQL, document databases, and ACID compliant with little worry about scale. It is vendor lockin to Azure, which you can route around with platform abstraction, but currently can't be beat. As you got that clean API layer you could change later but best way is limited/clean and if possible, non breaking change API layers/signatures.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#23

Post by jiggawatts »

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?

Azure App Service is a thing that everyone just skips over, listing competitors with an annual revenue smaller than some individual Azure App Service deployments...

I mean seriously, railway.app has just fifteen employees in total, and revenue in the single-digit millions.

Reminds me of when someone posted a "cloud storage vendors poster" with hundreds of vendors -- but not Azure -- some with revenues smaller than the cost of an Azure Storage Account one of my customers was using... to back up a single server. By accident.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#24

Post by aetherspawn »

ghiculescu wrote: post #11
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.

Our deployment is much smaller than yours! Our upfront hardware cost including carpentry and HVAC was around $80k, our monthly cost in cloud was around $5k/mo and now we pay only about $1k/mo in energy (which includes the existing $500/mo bill from the office). We could reduce this further with solar panels, but we share the tall-ish building with 13 other suites and we couldn't get approval to take up most of the roof.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#25

Post by raverbashing »

Radim wrote: post #17
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.

I agree

And more to the point, learning how to "handroll" Postgres could be beneficial. You could have learned about options for limiting the amount of memory, etc

Sure, managed is easier and use it when you can afford it easily. But before that, it's better to see how things are going (mem usage, disk usage, bottlenecks, etc)

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#27

Post by ghiculescu »

ksajadi wrote: post #14

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…

That's what I'm struggling with. You're not wrong, but I feel like it's way too easy to go to the other extreme and suddenly you're way in over your head.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#28

Post by Buttons840 »

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…

> We expected the HW to fail often and such, but in 2 years ... nothing has ever failed and the server has never gone offline (except when it reboots every Sunday @ 3AM in a min or two).

I began my career by scripting Asterisk using Python. I created a daemon using Twisted and that process ran for 3 years without fail (as in, the same Linux OS process was running for 3 years). This was on commodity hardware.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#29

Post by [deleted] »

Buttons840 wrote: post #28
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…

> We expected the HW to fail often and such, but in 2 years ... nothing has ever failed and the server has never gone offline (except when it reboots every Sunday @ 3AM in a min or two). I began my career by scripting Asterisk using Python. I created a daemon using Twisted and that process ran for 3 years without fail (as in, the same Linux OS process was running for 3 years). This was on commodity hardware.

[deleted]

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#30

Post by SenHeng »

erhaetherth wrote: post #19
SenHeng wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree. My daily tasks are more FE than BE simply because there are more FE things to do.
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