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Running costs for running a web app

cushionapp.com

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Re: Running costs for running a web app

#151

Post by patmcc »

destroytoday wrote: post #131
nacs wrote: post #58

From the expense report, it says you have a wildcard SSL (and it seems to be in use in the subdomain for the signup page for example) yet your main root site seems to be unavailable via SSL? Is there any reason for this or just an oversight?

The marketing site is static-hosted on S3 and I think when I first set that up it was either too expensive for SSL or not possible. I'm not 100% sure, but I'll definitely look into it again. The wildcard SSL was a recent addition after coming out of beta, which didn't have the multiple subdomains.

It's possible, as long as you're ok with SNI (which is a pretty minor issue these days). You have to setup SSL on CloudFront to get it to work, check out: https://bryce.fisher-fleig.org/blog/setting-up-ssl-on-aws-cl...

I used that for my static S3 site, it's working fine.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#152

Post by funkyy »

flurdy wrote: post #149
funkyy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bill looks huge. You can get SSL for like $8/year from reseller for one of the Symantec ones. I think that starting startup can cut a lot of corners by using open source resources and cheap cloud servers like DO.

I think people are misunderstanding the SSL costs for Cusion. The SSL certificate expense is listed as $99/year from namecheap, ie. $8.25/month, so there seems no need to get a Symantec one. However they/it/he are paying Heroku $20/month for handling the SSL traffic, not the certificate itself, which probably includes running a load balancing server in front of their apps that automate the SSL termination across node…

$99/year vs $8/year for 5 minutes job sounds like a good saving at least for me.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#153

Post by funkyy »

destroytoday wrote: post #129
funkyy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How your setup works then? Sounds like something that could improve performance of single dev.

I definitely plan to write about it on the journal ( http://cushionapp.com/journal ). I have channels for new users, Stripe charges/subscriptions, errors from Sentry, build notifications, and support notifications. I plan to also build some Slack bots that would help automate a few things.

Sweet, I am looking forward to it. Good job with the project!

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#155

Post by kasey_junk »

danieltillett wrote: post #147
jeffmould wrote: post #32

I always find breakdowns like this interesting. Just to get a feel for what others are using, their reasoning, and to generalize what others are spending monthly/annually. With more breakdowns like this from more companies, I think it provides a great understanding of costs. It also can give people a good baseline for understanding what costs are at certain levels of users and with certain functionality. While I unde…

Yes it is always great to learn what other people are doing. I have no issue over the costs with paying for all these services as it is almost always cheaper than building/setting up the same tools yourself, the issue I have is the lack of skills/understanding that going down this route encourages. I like to build everything myself so I learn, not because this is the most efficient way to run things. When something b…

You are certainly not building "everything" yourself. You are drawing a line just like OP, that where you draw that line is different than theirs is not at all surprising.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#156

Post by brohoolio »

destroytoday wrote: post #31
kyleblarson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I migrated from Heroku to OpsWorks a year ago and couldn't be happier.

Great to hear! My goal is to transition to AWS this year. I'll be sure to write about the cost differences.

I'd look at Google compute because of the auto discounts. Reservations are a pain the ass if your service keeps growing and shrinking.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#157

Post by fareesh »

At our agency we tend to have a lot of low budget projects, plus we like to keep expenses low if there's a relatively small overhead in return.

For saving on costs we use:

- Bitbucket over Github (Private repos are free, although Github has more features, so it depends on how much you use really)

- Email Hosting Zoho over Google (FREE): We tend to recommend Zoho to single entrepreneurs since it offers 10 accounts for free on your custom domain.

- CMS (FREE): We use our own barebones one that's similar to siteleaf.

- Redis/Web Server/DB Server ($40/mo) Digital Ocean over AWS/Heroku: DO Droplets for launch + initial marketing, and then depending on how things turn out, EC2 or more Droplets.

- SSL (FREE): Recently tried out Let's Encrypt. Works beautifully. Will probably use that for everything in the future.

- Exceptions (FREE): New Relic seems to do a decent job, although the paid plan over at Airbrake seems a lot better. Haven't tried Sentry, but will give it a shot after reading this post.

- Log Management (FREE): We use tail and grep :D It's messy but we survive

- Assets / CDN: Sometimes Cloudflare (free), sometimes S3/Cloudfront (same as article)

- Chat (FREE) Glip over Slack: Glip's free offering is better than Slack's, because you can confine people outside the organization to specific channels, which works fantastically for us.

- Fonts (FREE): We tend to advocate some decent looking Google Fonts that get the job done

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#158

Post by euske »

Is it normal to rely on this many external services when running a site? I'm obviously novice here, but my NIH syndromes kicks in, and I'd feel nervous if I had to deal with this many companies by myself alone.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#159

Post by ahmd »

destroytoday wrote: post #31
kyleblarson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I migrated from Heroku to OpsWorks a year ago and couldn't be happier.

Great to hear! My goal is to transition to AWS this year. I'll be sure to write about the cost differences.

have a look at https://forge.laravel.com

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#160

Post by doublerebel »

jasoon wrote: post #95
misiti3780 wrote: post #57

This is the first time I have ever heard of Papertrail. I really hate loggly and am looking for a better option - can anyone shed any light on if this is a good option ? Which log aggregation services is everyone using ?

We got frustrated with the UI on Loggly and wound up moving to Logentries ( https://logentries.com/ ). I've not used Papertrail, so can't compare to them, but it's significantly easier to use than Loggly, they've been kind to us through the odd overage, and it does what we need it to do (Centralise a load of application logs and allow us to search over them and set alerts). The live tail feature is nice as well.

Also have had great experiences with Logentries. Easy to integrate on every platform/OS, very configurable alerts, team has been pleasant and responsive to pull requests.
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