161–170 of 259 posts
I personally just use one ore more VPSs on DigitalOcean, which scale pretty well at first and if you get enough traction to need "infinite" horizontal scaling, it might be better to only focus on that once you have the money to hire some sys architect/admins.
As a one-man team operating a 10+ year old SaaS product, I’ve done two things that have helped keep things sustainable. The frontend continues to be server generated. PJAX style partial page updates is (mostly) dynamic enough. The maintenance burden of operating a JavaScript frontend is too high to justify for a 1-2 person team. The second thing I’ve done is avoid containers. VMs work fine for many types of applicati…
You didn't seem to get much of a reaction, probably because of your recommendations to go with proven (read: old & boring) tech, but I appreciate it. Front-end churn is real and, coupled with rapidly evolving and ever-abstracting containerization approaches, staying on top of it is a full-time job, best done as an employee.
Just build in what you know.
As a one-man team operating a 10+ year old SaaS product, I’ve done two things that have helped keep things sustainable. The frontend continues to be server generated. PJAX style partial page updates is (mostly) dynamic enough. The maintenance burden of operating a JavaScript frontend is too high to justify for a 1-2 person team. The second thing I’ve done is avoid containers. VMs work fine for many types of applicati…
My old and boring stack works just fine on the VMs that it runs on, and and continues to support me and my family financially with little to no downtime and decent work/life balance.
Of course I'm aware of the cons of programming in PHP versus other languages, but after 20 years of coding in it, I like to think that my code isn't all that bad.
Still, I'm reading some comments here and feel like I'm waaay behind the tech curve with my use of such an old stack, and am somewhat scared to admit it.
Your comment brought me relief :)
Serial one-man SaaS builder here with a pair of soft-landings and one big hit: I would agree with others who have opined that this is overkill. You couldn't pay me to use Terraform or Kubernetes for my SaaS unless it was a much larger team. My stack usually consists of this: A framework I am comfortable with that removes a lot of boilerplate (happens to be the one I know best in the language I know best), the databas…
OOC what framework do you use? More broadly, can you help me with an opinion on my present struggle? Here goes: I have a lot of ideas, a couple of which solve problems for me and I think are even _good_ ideas. However, none have shipped because I'm spending an inordinate amount of time building out what is essentially my own SaaS template. Is it worth investing the time in doing that, or are some of the commercial Sa…
Honestly, having gone down this path a year back, just use Heroku for your backend. Maybe Netlify if you want to separate your frontend and backend. The amount of complexity and interdependencies these "here's my stack" posts describe are always a huge cognitive overhead for running a one-person SaaS. Heroku costs more, but there's a reason for it. If you're even remotely making money from your product, and are alone…
We’re an Aussie company, and a large percentage of our customers are in Australia. Having servers only in the US and Europe mean that Australian customers speeds are slower than they should be, and private spaces are far too expensive to warrant it.
To me, the biggest headache of one-man SaaS is that you have to write API by code. I always use API-generation code for my products. The real value i bring to customers is my database, not API.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been spending some time looking at moving to heroku, but having trouble figuring out how to use it for a real production for deploy for "only" a couple hundred dollars a month. Is that what you're doing? "Standard" dynos and just a few of them are working for you, I assume, for that budget? In my tests, with a Rails app, "standard" dynos are looking surprisingly slow, possibly unacceptably so. Very curious to he…
With a standard dyno, you get something like 1/15th of a core on the underlying EC2 instance. IMO, they're best for workers where latency isn't an issue. For user-facing work, I use performance dynos. Heroku _is_ expensive, but in exchange, you don't have to worry much at all about the ops side of things. YMMV, it may not be suitable if you need to be profitable each month and can't afford to spend the baseline cost…
But once you are using a single performance dyno, you are unlikely looking at a bill that's only "couple hundred dollars a month".
Thanks for confirming you use performance dynos for user-facing stuff -- I thought I was going insane discovering that it didn't look like standard dynos were suitable for that for me -- is "everyone else" using them though? The heroku docs imply they are indeed... standard (that's the name), and the performance dynos are for unusual performance needs.
Which is not what it was looking like to me.
Based on my current investigations, I agree being prepared to spend $1000/month is a better back of the napkin to-start-with estimate.
Which, sure, is quite possibly still a value compared to the number of hours you'd be spending setting up and maintaning something else. Quite possibly! But it's not "a couple hundred dollars a month".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been spending some time looking at moving to heroku, but having trouble figuring out how to use it for a real production for deploy for "only" a couple hundred dollars a month. Is that what you're doing? "Standard" dynos and just a few of them are working for you, I assume, for that budget? In my tests, with a Rails app, "standard" dynos are looking surprisingly slow, possibly unacceptably so. Very curious to he…
Checkout Hatchbox.io, just started using it myself. You basically pay a flat monthly rate for their Heroku-esque management service and then pay for the servers on your provider of choice separately (e.g. DO, AWS, etc).
I'll take a look, it definitely looks interesting, thanks!
First of all, thank you all! Just the discussion on this post alone, is a goldmine for anyone trying to figure out what worked, and what not for others. This is why I love HN. To clarify a point about my article, I think everyone should do what works for them. Just because my unconventional stack for a solo founder works great for me, doesn't mean it will do the same for you. Your mileage may vary, and it all comes d…