Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
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Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#2Hi everyone, blog post author here. Over the last 18 months I've learned an incredible amount from the users here on Hacker News, and I figured that it's about time I started giving something back.
None of my web apps make serious money, but they bring in enough to make a difference to life, and I'm hoping that my articles will help others get on the same path - if not somewhat more successfully! ;)
Please feel free to ask me any questions. I'm aiming to have the next part written and live by early next week.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#3I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#4I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.
Because prgmr is cheap and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :)
For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not even covering hosting costs :)
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#5I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.
Because prgmr is cheap and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :) For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not e…
Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files is not exactly backup best practice.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#6Will you continue this story?
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#7I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.
Because if you know your unix and you have the time and experience to quickly setup the stack you need there's no need for a pretty control panel. If I only need ONE VM for something I know it's trivial to setup for me and will probably very seldom require me to use a admin console, I'd always go with pgrmr. There are situations though, where going with a bigger and shinier provider might make sense, but most of the time pgrmr is mighty fine for a beginning hobby business.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because prgmr is cheap and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :) For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not e…
Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files is not exactly backup best practice.
Thanks, great advice :) Right now I'm taking backups of dumps - slow, but a tiny bit easier to deal with. At some point I'm thinking about replicating to a slave somewhere, although to be honest I need to do some more reading about best practises.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#9Greatly written article, but I wish it hadn't been pulled apart into three separate posts.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because prgmr is cheap and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :) For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not e…
Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files is not exactly backup best practice.
I'd expand this to actually take the time to implement (or make yourself) a system to automate said backups and maybe even testing them automagically. You'll probably end up using the same set of scripts for all your beginning projects and it'll be worth having.