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I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

stevehanov.ca

311–320 of 539 posts

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#311
post #47

There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database that supports concurrent writes. The $15 difference won’t make any financial difference if you are trying to run a small business. Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.

The reason would be YAGNI. Apparently 1GB doesn’t constitute an actual limit for OP’s use case. I’m sure he’ll upgrade if and when the need arises.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SQLite on the same machine is akin to calling fwrite. Actually 35% faster than fwrite [1]. > This is also a system constraint as it forces a one-database-per-instance design You can scale incredibly far on a single node and have much better up time than github or anthropic. At this rate maybe even AWS/cloudflare. > you need to serve traffic beyond your local region Postgres still has a single node that can write. S…

> You can scale incredibly far on a single node Nonsense. You can't outrun physics. The latency across the Atlantic is already ~100ms, and from the US to Asia Pacific can be ~300ms. If you are interested in performance and you need to shave off ~200ms in latency, you deploy an instance closer to your users. It makes absolutely no sense to frame the rationale around performance if your systems architecture imposes a m…

That only solves read latency not write latency. Unless you don't care about consistency.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#314
post #47

There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database that supports concurrent writes. The $15 difference won’t make any financial difference if you are trying to run a small business. Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.

> "There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM"

> Immediately proposes alternative which is literally 4x the cost.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious?

> If I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious? It is specious reasoning. Self-imposing arbitrary constraints don't make you write good, performant code. At most it makes your apps run slower because they will needlessly hit your self-impose arbitrary constraints. If you put any value on performant c…

Constraints provide feedback. Real-world example from my job: we have no real financial constraints for dev teams. If their poor schema or query design results in SLO breaches, and they opt to upsize their DB instead of spending the effort to fix the root problem, that is accepted. They have no incentive to do otherwise, because there are no constraints.

I think your analogy is flawed; a more apt one would be training with deliberately reduced oxygen levels, which trains your body to perform with fewer resources. Once you lift that constraint, you’ll perform better.

You’re correct that you can write performant code without being required to do so, but in practice, that is a rare trait.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups, litestream gives you streaming replication to the second. Deployment, caddy holds open incoming connections whilst your app drains the current request queue and restarts. This is all sub second and imperceptible. You can do fancier things than this with two version of the app running on the same box if that's your thing. In my case I can also hot patch the running app as it's the JVM. Server hard drive faili…

> Backups, litestream gives you streaming replication to the second. You seem terribly confused. Backups don't buy you high availability. At best, they buy you disaster recovery. If your node goes down in flames, your users don't continue to get service because you have an external HD with last week's db snapshots.

If anything backups are the key to high availability.

Streaming replication lets you spin up new nodes quickly with sub second dataloss in the event of anything happening to your server. It makes having a warm standby/failover trivial (if your dataset is large enough to warrant it).

If your backups are a week old snapshots, you have bigger problems to worry about than HA.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#317
post #208

I'm taking the opposite approach - managed services all the way, and my monthly infrastructure costs are higher than what's described here. No regrets. Infrastructure isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. The problem is: who's actually going to pay for this? Optimizing infrastructure before you have customers is like designing a kitchen before you've written the menu. I launched within 72 hours of starting developme…

Some of this will depend on what experience you’ve got. Someone with lots of experience running Linux servers can probably stand up the sort of thing described in this article in a couple of hours from a starting point of being given the Go application source and a credit card.

Lol, try 20 min at most if taking it slow. (I used to be a linux admin)

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#319

> I use Linode or DigitalOcean. Pay no more than $5 to $10 a month. 1GB of RAM sounds terrifying to modern web developers, but it is plenty if you know what you are doing. If you get one dedicated server for multiple separate projects, you can still keep the costs down but relax those constraints. For example, look at the Hetzner server auction: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ I pay about 40 EUR a month for this: Disk: 7…

Why VMs over containers?

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#320

AWS is not value for money, I do have a DO account that is great but my development is mostly hosted locally with tunnels from cloudflare, it is remarkable how far you (I) can get with that setup.

Last I saw, AWS has way better peering agreements than DO. Lots of problems with terrible throughput and lots of dropped packets for various clients (in several cities in North America, not just overseas or in the middle of nowhere) that vanished instantly on switching to AWS (including overseas ones that were also having problems) Unfortunately, this isn’t something that shows up on spec sheets when you’re choosing…

Well where does it show up? This is the first I've heard of this. Any source?
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