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11 years of hosting a SaaS

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#151

Post by pchangr »

robertlagrant wrote: post #138
pchangr wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I find it hilarious because I find it extremely dysfunctional .. for everyone involved and yet… it’s true. I can tell you from personal experience… my partner somehow signed up for a stupid accounting online tool that we never used .. and we just find out 2 years later because we received a letter from a debt collection agency asking for the 2 years we “owed” for a service we never actually used .. but they kept “providing” us. And somehow even tho we never paid .. they never stopped. We very likely had to pay a lot more than what we would have to if they had stopped providing the service at some point in the first place. So yeah.. it just baffles me to think this is how things are supposed to work in this country and neither the provider nor we could do anything about it.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#152

Post by Glench »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #147
Glench wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh whoops it’s actually 4 million per day! Good catch.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#154

Post by robertlagrant »

pchangr wrote: post #151
robertlagrant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I find it hilarious because I find it extremely dysfunctional .. for everyone involved and yet… it’s true. I can tell you from personal experience… my partner somehow signed up for a stupid accounting online tool that we never used .. and we just find out 2 years later because we received a letter from a debt collection agency asking for the 2 years we “owed” for a service we never actually used .. but they kept “pro…

Not getting something you didn't pay for is not dysfunctional. It's what turned slavery-based, Feudal and Socialist countries into modern ones.

Your example seems to be unrelated, although it sounds frustrating.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#155

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

alberth wrote: post #148
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.

It’s definitely not the merchant’s responsibility to catch when your card changes.

We have this at work thanks to Stripe, and it’s wildly inconsistent. But beyond that, it won’t do anything for a closed/canceled card/cardholder account.

That situation was fully on OP. This could have happened at GCP, AWS, Azure, Linode, OVH, Rackspace, Oracle Cloud, you name it.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#156

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

withinboredom wrote: post #145
greenpeas wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For physical hosts that makes perfect sense. It would just be annoying with VM-exclusive providers like DO.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#157

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

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.

It’s very common that EULAs and other contracts explicitly state that the contractual parties agree that email is a valid means for written notifications.

I used to work for a SaaS firm. Every once in awhile the main office would receive a written and signed letters from (primarily) German users when they wanted to terminate their service. (We accepted that after confirmation using an authenticated email address, of course.)

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#158

Post by AndroTux »

pchangr wrote: post #151
robertlagrant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I find it hilarious because I find it extremely dysfunctional .. for everyone involved and yet… it’s true. I can tell you from personal experience… my partner somehow signed up for a stupid accounting online tool that we never used .. and we just find out 2 years later because we received a letter from a debt collection agency asking for the 2 years we “owed” for a service we never actually used .. but they kept “pro…

Well, the service provider was ready to provide you with it. They kept your account, your data and ensured the service is available for you to use. Why should they care about whether you use the service or not? It's like renting an apartment, then never bothering to move in. Why should the landlord care whether you move in or not? After all, it's your responsibility to book services you use and cancel the ones you don't use. You made the contract, so you should pay for it. Nobody is forcing you to keep the contract beyond what's agreed upon, but you can't retroactively say "hey, by the way, I didn't live in that apartment for three years, can I please have my money back?"

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#159

Post by alsiola »

drawkbox wrote: post #128
alsiola wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really do not share your experience with CosmosDB, some of it's attributes that currently make me miserable include... - Scaling is not infinite, it's up to 20gb per partition key (1), which can't be changed after document creation. - One set of global indices, no equivalent to DynamoDB's secondary indices. - Still can't run their docker container on mac (2) natively. - Weird SQL-like dialect that's required for all…

The partition key limitation is something you can work out with smart partitioning and horizontal scaling. We do the same already with storage/tables to prevent large data blocks at a smaller limit even for speed/lookups/map. Tooling could be improved and will be, it is fairly new still and the Azure Cosmos DB Emulator is not bad. There is a CosmosDB Synapse setup that allows more analytics/intel on top like you said…

Most experience with DynamoDB, which isn't without challenges, and has a steepish learning curve to get the most out of it.

I work in pre-market fit startup though, so hyper-scaleability is not really a consideration right now, and would much prefer to be running postgres.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#160

Post by pchangr »

robertlagrant wrote: post #154
pchangr wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hilarious because I find it extremely dysfunctional .. for everyone involved and yet… it’s true. I can tell you from personal experience… my partner somehow signed up for a stupid accounting online tool that we never used .. and we just find out 2 years later because we received a letter from a debt collection agency asking for the 2 years we “owed” for a service we never actually used .. but they kept “pro…

Not getting something you didn't pay for is not dysfunctional. It's what turned slavery-based, Feudal and Socialist countries into modern ones. Your example seems to be unrelated, although it sounds frustrating.

But.. that’s not what happened. I was getting something I didn’t paid for .. that’s what I find dysfunctional. Because that means there’s a lot of extra effort in the country on getting unpaid services paid. My personal experience just adds the cherry on top that I was also not using it. So it was wasted effort on the provider and society in general.
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