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11 years of hosting a SaaS

ghiculescu.substack.com

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#141

Post by machinawhite »

pseg134 wrote: post #125
ghiculescu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm not proud of it.

It’s not whether or not you are proud that has people upset. They gave you a month of free service and you ignored their attempts to contact you. You are using this incident to paint them in a negative light when they probably gave you more than you deserved in the situation. Your attitude is very entitled for the size of customer you were. If they sent you text messages or letters I would assume you would have ignor…

I'm not sure I see any criticism of DO in OPs post. They said _their_ setup was dodgy, and _they_ aren't proud of not checking the inbox. Other than that they just explained what happened, no? Looks like a bit of misunderstanding to me

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#142

Post by machinawhite »

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 think they meant their own setup is dodgy, not DO's

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#143

Post by joshstrange »

l5870uoo9y wrote: post #32

> We didn’t take advantage of any other platform features, we just treated AWS like any other VPS. This is a lot of switching around for a plain VPS.

Yeah, if you aren’t going to use AWS managed services then what are you doing on AWS? EC2 is great but if that’s all your using your probably overpaying.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#144

Post by roblh »

mejutoco wrote: post #98
kristiandupont wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQLite seems to be gaining popularity with even larger projects which is surprising to me. As I see it, the big value prop of SQLite is that it runs in-process which, for a webapp, is almost nil? Other than that, it's not like queries are any simpler and the "simple" type system is, in my opinion, not a feature. I get that some might disagree with that. Is there some other reason why you would prefer it?

I agree with you about the worse type system not being a feature. Also missing the json features of postgres is inconvenient. Only one file to backup or deploy is the biggest advantage of sqlite IMO.

It may not quite have all of the JSON features of Postgres, but recently the JSON handling has become way more usable in SQLite. More than usable for sure.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#145

Post by withinboredom »

greenpeas wrote: post #135
withinboredom wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep, that’s how things are done with my colo. Real papers. Real signatures. I don’t need to send any letters to spin up a vm though. I just click a button. For new servers, I walk in and plug it in.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#146

Post by throwaway2037 »

roblh wrote: post #144
mejutoco wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you about the worse type system not being a feature. Also missing the json features of postgres is inconvenient. Only one file to backup or deploy is the biggest advantage of sqlite IMO.

It may not quite have all of the JSON features of Postgres, but recently the JSON handling has become way more usable in SQLite. More than usable for sure.

Hat tip to both the amazing native JSON support from Postgres, and the SQLite module with JSON functions: https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#147

Post by throwaway2037 »

Glench wrote: post #113
kristiandupont wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQLite seems to be gaining popularity with even larger projects which is surprising to me. As I see it, the big value prop of SQLite is that it runs in-process which, for a webapp, is almost nil? Other than that, it's not like queries are any simpler and the "simple" type system is, in my opinion, not a feature. I get that some might disagree with that. Is there some other reason why you would prefer it?

Here’s a great article explaining some of the benefits of using SQLite in production: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite I use it in my production SaaS serving around 4 million requests per month on one of the lowest DigitalOcean tiers. The big ones for me were cost, operating simplicity and performance. I don’t need a separate process or server running which has saved me some money and time, and the app…

"4 million requests per month"

There are 2,592,000 seconds in a month. So, 1.5 requests per second?

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#148

Post by alberth »

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…

But it kind of is.

Merchant payment services exist that can automatically obtain the updated card-on-file credential when they are about to expire.

Both Visa and Mastercard offer this directly, or you can get the same service from a PSP.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#149

Post by yurishimo »

SenHeng wrote: post #15
awayto wrote: post #3

> We started on Heroku, because in 2012 if you did any Ruby on Rails tutorial that included deploying your app, you ended up with a Heroku account. Couldn't be more accurate. Heroku and Rails is almost as much of a throwback as Node and Express. You just had to be there. And it was great. Web dev was always a hobby for me as a teen, but then I turned to the rails book as a means of learning a professionally designed…

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…

It's not too late to go back! Rails and Laravel are still insanely popular and productive for getting work done.

I'm also disappointed that real frontend expertise is not valued as highly as a traditional backend engineer. Think about someone like an Architect. You could say that they are glorified artists (yes, I know they do more than that) and they are highly valued for their artistic input as well as their professional advice; but it's also not unheard of to have an architect solely provide artistic direction and a structural engineer provide support.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#150

Post by tacker2000 »

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.

Yea i also dont see the point of having everything “managed”.

RDS is crazy expensive compared to self hosting and if i have the DB on prem its much faster as well. And the admin overhead is not so big to be honest if you are using just one DB.

If you are Google scale of course things will change, but I think 80% of loads dont need any managed AWS stuff, replications, multiple nodes, kubernetes, etc… just periodic backups and it runs fine.

But people nowadays just like throwing money around I guess, instead of trying to set it up for themselves.

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