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11 years of hosting a SaaS

ghiculescu.substack.com

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#31

Post by Sai_ »

ghiculescu wrote: post #11
aetherspawn wrote: post #10

Would be interested to know what your hosting bill was like? We recently moved everything in-house and started hosting our own servers. Having physical access to the machine (and the network HW) pretty much eliminated all of our dev ops (1). We expected the HW to fail often and such, but in 2 years the only maintenance we had to do was add more disks to the RAID array and resize the partition a few times. Even though…

It's around 150k USD/month at the moment. Would love to learn more about your setup. Email me if you're interested in chatting. Email in my profile.

fyi - tanda.co gives a 403 forbidden error

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#33

Post by woutr_be »

erhaetherth wrote: post #19
SenHeng wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Not that it matters, but there definitely is a tendency in our industry to 'look down' on frontenders as not real engineers and thus not consider them for leadership positions. I think that's funny because there some to be a ton of backenders that can't do frontend at all. And then they want to look down on FE when they can't do it themselves? It's not just basic HTML and CSS if you're building a complex app. I do…

I had the same experience with some backend engineers, they constantly looked down on the front-end engineers, ridiculing JavaScript and CSS. And while all those frontend engineers picked up backend languages and became fullstack developers. Those backend engineers couldn't do the most basic frontend things to save their lives.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#34

Post by tap-snap-or-nap »

awayto wrote: post #18
drawkbox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Node and Express. You just had to be there. And it was great. I agree and Node and Express are still great when going with just js. Node and Koa more now but still great. Socket.io for real-time. All are great for getting things up quickly, simple and shipping things.

For sure. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Node and express are still great. I still use them. Heroku and rails would still be great to this day, too.

Node and Express are definitely winners for my use case.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#35

Post by polote »

Well I do not feel any of the 3 advice he gives, good advice.

First the longer you stay in heroku ,the most complex is it to exit it the time you really need it and the less flexible you are in the time being.

Second, wish he had pay for a pit team sooner, but could this money better used investing in marketing or sales like he probably did ?

The guy has obviously succeeded as a business owner, would it still be the case if he had implemented these advice ? We will never know, but what we know for sure is not implementing these advice made him successful

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#36

Post by codetiger »

polote wrote: post #35

Well I do not feel any of the 3 advice he gives, good advice. First the longer you stay in heroku ,the most complex is it to exit it the time you really need it and the less flexible you are in the time being. Second, wish he had pay for a pit team sooner, but could this money better used investing in marketing or sales like he probably did ? The guy has obviously succeeded as a business owner, would it still be the…

I think he meant, to stay with managed services as long as possible. Which makes sense, as in the early stage, the focus has to be the functionality rather than cost/performance optimisation.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#37

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

ksajadi wrote: post #14

the progression from Heroku to AWS is very common as SaaS businesses grow. However one thing that’s missing from all “alternatives to Heroku” is what I call life after deployment or Day-2 operations. Many solutions show you a sleek demo of how easily you can deploy a Hello World app to their platform but leave you in a straight jacket when it the app is deployed and you need tools to keep it running, like changing an…

vercel is great

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#38

Post by dasil003 »

woutr_be wrote: post #33
erhaetherth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that it matters, but there definitely is a tendency in our industry to 'look down' on frontenders as not real engineers and thus not consider them for leadership positions. I think that's funny because there some to be a ton of backenders that can't do frontend at all. And then they want to look down on FE when they can't do it themselves? It's not just basic HTML and CSS if you're building a complex app. I do…

I had the same experience with some backend engineers, they constantly looked down on the front-end engineers, ridiculing JavaScript and CSS. And while all those frontend engineers picked up backend languages and became fullstack developers. Those backend engineers couldn't do the most basic frontend things to save their lives.

Meh. FE, BE, system, embedded; they all go deep. A good engineer can learn one or more in any order, but only fools look down on a discipline they don't understand.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#39

Post by speedgoose »

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.

I'm looking at the ansible playbooks to setup my favourite beefy baremetal Hetzner server (128GB ram, Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core, 450Gb fast NVME SSD, 3.5TB x2 NVME SSDs, 155€/month):

- Install Debian 11 while booted in rescue mode.

- Setup the root file system encryption using cryptsetup and dropbear (to enter the key during the boot through SSH). Involves chroot and some fun commands.

- Setup ZFS encrypted mirror filesystem for the two additional SSDs.

- OpenSSH hardening and Teleport installation.

- Kubernetes installation (K3S)

- Connecting kubernetes to my Argo CD instance or an existing Kubernetes cluster.

And then through GitOps:

- Installation of openebs-zfspv

- Installation of kube-prometheus-stack helm chart

- Installation of (many) postgresql instances and other craps

I have been playing with Linux servers for 20 years and I find this fun and rewarding. But I do understand people saying that baremetal Hetzner is not for everyone. Especially if you start to have requirements such as "data must be encrypted at rest".

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#40

Post by catiopatio »

erhaetherth wrote: post #19
SenHeng wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Not that it matters, but there definitely is a tendency in our industry to 'look down' on frontenders as not real engineers and thus not consider them for leadership positions. I think that's funny because there some to be a ton of backenders that can't do frontend at all. And then they want to look down on FE when they can't do it themselves? It's not just basic HTML and CSS if you're building a complex app. I do…

Kernel/compiler/OS/formal verification engineer here.

This all seems silly.

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