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11 years of hosting a SaaS

ghiculescu.substack.com

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#131

Post by whynotmaybe »

erhaetherth wrote: post #21
Radim wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know how long the downtime might be? Have you tested your backup recently?

Gitlab had a long downtime because the backup was huge and on the other side of the country. The backup server was on a low speed network.

https://www.arcserve.com/blog/lessons-learned-gitlabs-massiv...

How much money would you lose if you were down for one week? How many customer would you lose?

How much credibility would you lose?

For my peace of mind, I can't afford a spof when I know one lingering.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#132

Post by withinboredom »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #107
ghiculescu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm not proud of it.

Would you explain why you're trying to implicate DO as being in any way "dodgy" or at fault for your own failure to pay them? You got a month of service for free, and they attempted numerous times to contact you about your bill, you just didn't read their emails.

I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication. Cutting services to a business effectively disabled their business (especially servers). You’d think they would send at least one letter.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#133

Post by oaiey »

> At our first meeting our [AWS] account manager brought along his solutions architect. I had never met a solutions architect, so I didn’t really know what they did.

> Eventually I realised that I wasn’t the problem.

I had the same experience. These free "Solution Architects" are a disgrace to the architecture profession. They are sales person and are paid/rated/motivated to sell you up. Not what is best for you. Ours went over the in-house architect with zero feedback and told our CTO/CIO how shitty the architecture is. Fun. Stay away from them.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#134

Post by tommica »

AndroTux wrote: post #59

> But the worst Digital Ocean incident we ever had was when they turned all our droplets off all at once. The credit card entered into the account had expired, there was no backup card, and the contact email on the account went to a shared inbox that was not monitored. So for probably a month we were getting and ignoring billing alerts, until we really paid attention when everything was offline and not responding to…

I read the "dodgy, shaky" parts as their own setup was that, not digital oceans

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#135

Post by greenpeas »

withinboredom wrote: post #132
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you explain why you're trying to implicate DO as being in any way "dodgy" or at fault for your own failure to pay them? You got a month of service for free, and they attempted numerous times to contact you about your bill, you just didn't read their emails.

I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication. Cutting services to a business effectively disabled their business (especially servers). You’d think they would send at least one letter.

> I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication.

The flipside of requiring a provider to submit paperwork to terminate your service, is the situation where in order to setup a new server with DO you'd have to file paperwork yourself. Can you imagine sending a paper letter every time you need to spin up a VM?

Which one do you prefer? paperwork in both directions or no paperwork?

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#136

Post by 123pie123 »

oaiey wrote: post #133

> At our first meeting our [AWS] account manager brought along his solutions architect. I had never met a solutions architect, so I didn’t really know what they did. > Eventually I realised that I wasn’t the problem. I had the same experience. These free "Solution Architects" are a disgrace to the architecture profession. They are sales person and are paid/rated/motivated to sell you up. Not what is best for you. Our…

If something is free etc...

I've always taken the advice of any prepaid 'experts' with a huge grain of salt, not just AWS

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#137

Post by robertlagrant »

AndroTux wrote: post #84
rocho wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there's Twitter who doesn't pay GCS and AWS for months and keeps operating normally.

Yeah, Twitter is totally comparable in that case, $50 a month is exactly the same thing as however many Millions of Dollars Twitter is paying to GCS/AWS with presumably custom contracts. But just to humor you: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/14/twitter-is-being-evicted-f...

Apropos of nothing, $27k/mo for an office for 300 people!?

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#138

Post by robertlagrant »

pchangr wrote: post #127
AndroTux wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a business that makes checks notes 50 bucks a month in revenue with DO? If this were the case, prices would be astronomically high because there would be tons of scammers and bad actors abusing this system, leaving their servers running for months, because apparently DO has to send them a letter via snail mail to Antarctica and wait for their response. All of this would then have to be paid for by legitimate cust…

That’s exactly how it works for providers in Germany… as a foreigner I find it hilarious. You do get back-charged on the extra costs, tho.

Why's it hilarious? If you stopped paying for something, how long should you get that thing for? What if you don't pay the back-charges?

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#139

Post by robertlagrant »

withinboredom wrote: post #132
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you explain why you're trying to implicate DO as being in any way "dodgy" or at fault for your own failure to pay them? You got a month of service for free, and they attempted numerous times to contact you about your bill, you just didn't read their emails.

I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication. Cutting services to a business effectively disabled their business (especially servers). You’d think they would send at least one letter.

> I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication

Email is legal in all countries, as far as I'm aware.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#140

Post by pdimitar »

It really makes me super bitter how people like the author of the article who basically fumble their way through stuff are still successful, even though they seem to have done a lot of stuff the wrong way.

Calling out D.O. for a fairly transparent process is very wrong. They did what they had to and OP was oblivious to a fairly standard process of "hey, your CC expired, let's do something about it before we turn off your servers" which OP seems to have ignored several times in a row.

All of the story felt like he was just stumbling from one hype to another, and from one easy to avoid mistake to another. Even when I had only 7 years of experience in total (now I have 21.5) I was paranoid enough to look for DB ID turn-over and absolutely would have made sure to upgrade the DB server when I start noticing it hits 80% load consistently.

But that's life for you. A technically excellent guy still lives paycheck to paycheck, meanwhile an absent-minded guy who is easily hyped has a successful business. [sighs deeply] ...Moving on.

Finally, choosing AWS but still only using EC2 is kinda non-intuitive for me; why do that at all? Maybe because they allow transparent upgrading that makes for less sysadmin work? If so then fair, but that's still like buying a Ferrari to drive on long empty roads but never go above 90 km/h.

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