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11 years of hosting a SaaS

ghiculescu.substack.com

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#191

Post by ghiculescu »

mejutoco wrote: post #55
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".

Or you could use sqlite until you need postgres. I have to admit I reach for postgres immediately when in many cases sqlite would have served me just as well.

I’m super intrigued by SQLite these days.

11 years ago you used Postgres because that’s what Heroku told you to use.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#192

Post by ghiculescu »

RandomWorker wrote: post #121

This story resonates with me — apparently we are on phase two. And we need dedicated team members to take care of this. Thanks for sharing your lessons this was hugely valuable. Don’t let the negative comments get you down, when building things it’s hard and it’s all a big learning game. Congratulations on building a great piece of software.

Thanks! Reach out if you ever need a hand.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#194

Post by rozhok »

timwis wrote: post #101
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…

Can’t you do rails c in fly via the fly ssh console command?

The point is you can do it from Heroku UI.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#195

Post by aetherspawn »

8organicbits wrote: post #92
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…

> since we owned the hardware it meant that efficient utilization wasn't a requirement for us anymore This is a great point. Hyper focus on optimizing micro-containers is costly and sucks up a lot of time. You can still deploy like this in the cloud though. On AWS make a three-year reservation of a c6a.32xlarge to get 128 vCPU for $16k annually. Hetzner is cheaper, 80 vCPU for about €2,506 annually. [1] https://insta…

One of our 100 core boxes is Windows Server and it looks like they want $79,949 annually for it.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#196

Post by adamckay »

lakomen wrote: post #123

Those are such noob mistakes. No bigint OID, or worse, not UUIDv4, because even int64 will overflow, maybe not on their platform, but on a platform with millions of new inserts a day, despite being a large number, isn't future proof. If anyone knows a better 128bit alternative to UUIDv4, please respond. Side remark, that's what I was trying to tell the dgraph guy. If you have an int64 ID for ALL your transactions and…

> What annoys me is that I'm actually seeking a job now and that I can't find one that fits my needs, despite being way past those Kinderkrankheiten (child diseases), because those jobs nowadays require you to be an AWS zealot, which I'm not

Perhaps its more to do with your attitude?

This comment comes across as very condescending and needlessly aggressive to someone admitting their mistakes made whilst growing their successful business and graciously sharing them so others can learn or commiserate on similar mistakes.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#197

Post by atomicnumber3 »

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?

Can it be that between docker and digital ocean giving you a gig of ram for $6/mo, people are just DIYing it much more often these days?

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#198

Post by nathants »

lakomen wrote: post #123

Those are such noob mistakes. No bigint OID, or worse, not UUIDv4, because even int64 will overflow, maybe not on their platform, but on a platform with millions of new inserts a day, despite being a large number, isn't future proof. If anyone knows a better 128bit alternative to UUIDv4, please respond. Side remark, that's what I was trying to tell the dgraph guy. If you have an int64 ID for ALL your transactions and…

lambda is great for three things:

- scaling to zero for low use services

- reliably managing other infrastructure, like pools of ec2 or ephemeral ec2 spot

- getting 1000 cpu cores for 5 seconds to do latency sensitive data heavy lifting

the elephant in the room with cloud is always egress bandwidth billing. egress heavy apps just shouldn’t live on aws.

for me, the fun with aws is not figuring out how to make cloud lasagna and then write thought leader blogs about how tasty it is, but in understanding which parts of aws are actually better than alternatives, and how to compose them into good systems.

s3, dynamo, ec2, ec2 spot, lambda, r53. egress bandwidth aside, these things are for great good.

add in cf workers+r2 for egress bandwidth heavy components.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#199

Post by aetherspawn »

aetherspawn wrote: post #195
8organicbits wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since we owned the hardware it meant that efficient utilization wasn't a requirement for us anymore This is a great point. Hyper focus on optimizing micro-containers is costly and sucks up a lot of time. You can still deploy like this in the cloud though. On AWS make a three-year reservation of a c6a.32xlarge to get 128 vCPU for $16k annually. Hetzner is cheaper, 80 vCPU for about €2,506 annually. [1] https://insta…

One of our 100 core boxes is Windows Server and it looks like they want $79,949 annually for it.

I wanted to add more info but couldn't edit. We bought that server for $12,000 with 5 year warranty, and got our Windows Server licenses out of an MS bundle which cost about $400.

I think that brings the ROI after 5 years compared with AWS to something like 3200%, less energy, if nothing goes wrong.

(I know that there are better options than running Windows Server on this box, but it seems to perform the same, it's far easier to administer by inexperienced devops, and in the long term it's actually around $1500/yr cheaper than running supported RHEL. Our other box is running supported RHEL but after testing Windows Server and having no issues we'll probably switch it for the cost savings).

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#200

Post by gen220 »

jwr wrote: post #118

I read this article with interest, having run a SaaS for the last 8 years or so (solo-founder). I find it intriguing that the OP needed so much compute power. Computers are really powerful these days. As a counterpoint of sorts, here's my "hosting journey": * run everything on a single physical server rented at Hetzner (DE) * [... several years pass, business grows ...] * switch to ansible, learn it, spend a week or…

Just curious, if you feel comfortable sharing, what do you use as your database?

I'd agree Postgres is not the right answer to every problem, but the documentation of its failure modes and the mitigations thereof make it a "good" answer to "most" problems.

I'm curious what the "problem" (in access pattern terms, doesn't have to be business terms) and "solution" (i.e. persistence technology) is in your setup!

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