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I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

stevehanov.ca

381–390 of 539 posts

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#381
post #357
post #79

If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices". Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups"…

Hmm backups seems like an important one.

And also incredibly trivial to fix. Most VPS providers include their own backup services, and for the rest there's rsnapshot and some other cheaper VPS somewhere else to keep it "off site."

Too many have forgotten what it means to administrate a single system. You can do a lot with very simple tooling.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#382
post #58
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it nonsense? Sounds reasonable to me.

> its ceiling (both typical and absolute) is far lower If you plan to remaining smaller than instagram, the ceiling is comfortably above you.

The context was explicitly single machine.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#383
post #357
post #79

If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices". Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups"…

Hmm backups seems like an important one.

Yes, and is super easy.

I do like this: cron to run the backup and then rsync to https://www.rsync.net, then an after script that check it was run and post to my telegram the analysis.

That is.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#384
post #79

If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices". Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups"…

When I was a consultant we would plan out 25 piece cloud deployments for little pie in the sky apps that would never see more than 200 users. Everyone has been trained that 'cloud' means a lot of expensive moving parts and doesn't stop to plan their deployments beyond that.

Digital ocean has Kubernetes ffs.

It's all of five minutes to write a deployment yaml and ingress and have literally anything on the web for a handful of dollars a month.

I've written rust services doing 5k QPS on DO's cheapest kube setup.

It's not rocket science.

Serverless node buns with vite reacts are more complicated than this.

Ten lines of static, repeatable, versioned yaml config vs a web based click by click deploy installer with JavaScript build pipelines and magical well wishes that the pathing and vendor specific config are correct.

And don't tell me VPS FTP PHP or sshing into a box to special snowflake your own process runner are better than simple vanilla managed kube.

You can be live on the web from zero in 5 minutes with Digital Ocean kube, and that's counting their onboarding.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#385

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

As someone who sets up a k3s cluster for a single user project I feel called out.

The thing is one you learn the technology, everything else seems more work than the "easy way".

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#386
post #66

Always good to challenge the narrative - but I don't pay for RDS Postgres because of the WAL, replication, all the beauty of pg etc. I pay RDS because it's largely set and forget. I am gladly paying AWS to think about it for me. I think at a certain scale, this is a really good tradeoff. At the very beginning it could be overkill, and at the top end obviously its unsuitable - but for most of us those tradeoffs are wh…

You can use stuff like Litestream to continuously back up your SQLite DB to a cheap storage bucket. It's practically set and forget too.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, (...) This is specious reasoning. You don't prevent anything by adding artificial constraints. To put things in perspective, Hetzner's cheapest vCPU plan comes with 4GB of RAM.

If I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious?

Why not a box with 128MB of RAM then?

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I saw, AWS has way better peering agreements than DO. Lots of problems with terrible throughput and lots of dropped packets for various clients (in several cities in North America, not just overseas or in the middle of nowhere) that vanished instantly on switching to AWS (including overseas ones that were also having problems) Unfortunately, this isn’t something that shows up on spec sheets when you’re choosing…

Well where does it show up? This is the first I've heard of this. Any source?

Source was we used it, and that's what we saw, ~20% of clients on three continents (about half in North America) consistently had terrible connectivity to DO (not none, but it was really bad) and we spent a lot of time trying to fix it. Vanished through nothing but shifting that to AWS. It was clearly DO's peering network.

You probably won't see this unless both the following are true for your situation:

1) You have a workload that makes this issue noticeable. Long-lived connections and large transfer sizes make it more likely you'll notice. Loading 20kb of static html over the connection likely won't seem to have any problems (unless you run repeated trials and network analysis tools). Of course, modern websites can be pretty large...

2) Your users are long-term enough and in communication with you so these issues can even be noticed in the first place. Also helps if they're technical. If you're not hearing the story and aware of the situation on the other end of the line, all you see is a slow connection, could be anything causing it, and there are plenty of them for reasons that have to do with things closer to the client's end.

So all e.g. an e-commerce site might see is a somewhat higher bounce rate than necessary (due to some fraction of their users experiencing the site like it's on a somewhat-jittery ISDN line) without even knowing they're leaving money on the table because they likely have no way of even being aware of the problem.

[EDIT] Yes, we tried shifting around a bunch of ways on DO's side trying all kinds of ways to fix this, I'm quite sure it wasn't that we were unlucky with our hardware draw there or just one of their datacenters had this problem. It was something past the edge of their network.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#389
I quite like the websequencediagram. looks like a cool product!

He's mainly talking about the tech implementation which is the easy part.

the hard part of creating a business is finding a problem valuable enough to solve and reaching the users who need that problem solved. that's where the real value is.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#390
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing would happen, ssh is designed to be open to the world. Using tailscale or a vpn to hide your IP is fine, but using tailscale ssh maybe not.

Well continuous attempts definitely bogged down my desktop pretty bad. Also, getting OOM on a 64gb machine multiple times a day is quiet annoying. And one simple mistake, and we're screwed

If sshd is OOMing on 64GB something else is going on…
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