DigitalOcean App Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#221

Post by pwdisswordfish0 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 12:36 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #37

phildougherty wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I think I misunderstood what you were saying there. Could you clarify a bit more about what kind of functionality you'd prefer we support in the scenario you described? A large influx of traffic hits your application while you are unavailable to handle it. If you do not have autoscaling enabled, your application performance could suffer, if you do have it enabled your bill could grow out of bounds. We do plan…

We do plan to let you set min and max bounds for autoscaling once it is implemented. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about, but for money rather than computing resources or bandwidth. I'd like a feature that where the requirement is effectively "Fall back to a serving sorry-I'm-poor.html instead of the app if the total monthly bill has exceeded $xxx". For a side project I'm more interested in not paying…

If there's any confusion about this, look at nearlyfreespeech.net.

You deposit funds (let's say $20) into your account, and as your site consumes resources, it draws from your balance. So $20 is $20. If you set up a crummy low-traffic blog and that $20 lasts four months, then fine. If it lasts two weeks and then there's a surge in traffic, or the server hits some bug that causes it to spiral out of control, then your site gets killed when your balance hits $0. You can set up alerts, but there's a hard limit for how much you can be charged—it's whatever funds you deposited into your account. (Really, that's not even the right way to put it, because you're charged at the moment you deposit them.)

This isn't acceptable for everybody—many businesses would prefer to stay up and be billed after-the-fact. But that use cases is already well-served by the industry. (Overserved, really.) The market segment where the alternative situation is the best fit (pretty much every hobbiest who isn't bringing in a single cent off their side project) is extremely underserved. NFSN is the only provider I know of that even offers this.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#222

Post by pwdisswordfish0 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 12:43 AM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #83

mrkurt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, we (Fly.io) have this feature, and announced it as part of our launch post on HN. But literally no one has asked us to enable it on their apps. So we never made it self service. I think for most companies, it's better to set the expectation that the service costs money, bursts will cost more money, and then forgive outlier charges once or twice. It's tremendously difficult to compete against the…

Very interesting that this feature is often demanded in tones of righteous outrage on posts about autoscaling cloud services, yet when actually implemented, nobody has actually set it up.

In addition to there being no self-service, the kinds of people who want this aren't going to be using Fly.io in the first place. Look at the prices. DigitalOcean's $5 droplet would cost over $50/month on Fly.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#223

Post by mrkurt » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 12:59 AM UTC

pwdisswordfish0 wrote: post #222

ufmace wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting that this feature is often demanded in tones of righteous outrage on posts about autoscaling cloud services, yet when actually implemented, nobody has actually set it up.

In addition to there being no self-service, the kinds of people who want this aren't going to be using Fly.io in the first place. Look at the prices. DigitalOcean's $5 droplet would cost over $50/month on Fly.

That's not true. Our CPU VMs are similar to DO's CPU optimized droplets. The cheaper droplets are all shared CPU.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#224

Post by fuster » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

woogley wrote: post #179

ohashi wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing due to multiple security incidents

Not only that, but outright lying about the breaches. When I used them in early 2010s, they managed to expose two different virtual CC numbers (which I _only_ used for Linode) to fraudulent charges. But both times they insisted I was not part of the breach they were suffering at the time ...

Oh wow I think I just figured out how a VERY limited-use card number got stolen around that same time.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#225

Post by mwarkentin » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

bleepblorp wrote: post #216

ev1 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a difference in goals. - Hobby kid doesn't want to overpay, shut everything down - Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget Guess which one they optimise for?

Very large businesses might not care about spend, but pretty much everyone else does. Almost everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill for non-converting visits because their site went viral. Everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill because their site was used in a DDoS reflection attack, or got pwned and used in a DDoS attack directly. Everything I run on nickle-and-dim…

They have free anomaly detection on spending now (not sure how useful yet).

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#226

Post by biztos » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

avolcano wrote: post #89

Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups. I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB). Additionally, my web app is a…

I've given some thought to the PG offering -- $15/mo is really just for a dev instance with some minimal backup, it costs more to do anything production-level.

My conclusion -- YMMV! -- is that I'd happily pay that much to "set and forget" the DB in a proof-of-concept or hobby context. I realize it's not perfect, and there are cheaper options, but I really think they gave us a cheap-enough deal, and you can always play sysadmin if it's too much for you.

I'm not a big DO customer but I appreciate their pricing transparency: having worked professionally with 2/3 of the major Cloud companies I would never put anything there that's billed to my own account.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#227

Post by garrison » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:22 AM UTC

I tried deploying a static site. DO App Platform makes the file page1/index.html available both at /page1 and at /page1/. If the page contains any relative links or images, it is impossible for both URLs to reference these links correctly. Most web servers handle this by redirecting /page1 to /page1/ before serving it. Netlify does this as well. Vercel works the same as DO in its default mode, but it allows the user to configure the trailing slash behavior to get the redirect. Hugo, for one, assumes all files are served with a trailing slash.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#228

Post by wolfgang000 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:32 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

What problem did you have with linode? I had been using them for a couple of months and the experience so far has been great

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#229

Post by MarxOk » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:36 AM UTC

Is it just me or is Heroku mostly dead now? Most people I know have given up on "PaaS" and gone back to plain EC2 etc. It's just not that hard to spin up an instance and deploy a rails/django or whatever app, especially with Docker now.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#230

Post by NikolaeVarius » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:47 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #220

user5994461 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have images in almost every post. Diagram, schemas, stock images, gif, anything. I guess you don't? The difference between $2 and $20 will strike when you start having pictures and with $200 the day you (accidentally) put a large image or GIF.

You can lose money accidentally in many ways. I agree you have to watch out, but still disagree with the number of people dismissing S3 as a quick way to bankruptcy if you get HN #1.

Cloudflare/Cloudfront, restrict origin IP. Done