Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

stevehanov.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 539 posts

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

#511

Post by NohatCoder »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #353
senko wrote: post #79

If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices". Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups"…

Don’t forget that people involved in information technology procurement will pay very large sums of the company’s money to not have to understand anything.

Don’t forget that people involved in information technology procurement will pay very large sums of the company’s money to not understand anything.

FTFY

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

#512

Post by icedchai »

t_mahmood wrote: post #63
gobdovan wrote: post #18

Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned. One note: you can absolutely use Python or Node just as well as Go. There's Hetzner that offers 4GB RAM, 10TB network (then 1$/TB egress), 2CPUs machines for 5$. Two disclaimers for VPS: If you're using a dedicated server instead of a cloud server, just don't forget to backup DB to a Storage box often (3$ /mo for 1TB, use rsync). It's a good…

About security, wall of shame story, Once I had Postgresql db with default password on a new vps, and forgetting to disable password based login, on a server with no domain. And it got hacked in a day, and was being used as bot server. And that was 10 years ago. Recently deployed server, and was getting ssh login attempts within an hour, and it didn't had a domain. Fortunately, I've learned my lesson, and turned of p…

I've had SSH, SMTP, POP3, HTTP, HTTPS and many other services open to the world since the 90's. I have fail2ban running. It is not that scary.

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

#513

Post by icedchai »

abujazar wrote: post #265
nerder92 wrote: post #257

This is supposed to be a contrarian opinion yet this is a retoric yapped non-stop in the “build in public” community. Of course lean is a good approach, it makes sense, and most engineers know this. Is not a new concept, we’ve been doing this for years in every branch of engineering. The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narr…

I've seen A LOT of public sector projects starting out with loads of Azure services and >$3000 montly bills for applications that could've easily run on a single VM.

Same. They've been sold a bill of goods by big cloud tech and company.

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

#514

Post by locknitpicker »

andersmurphy wrote: post #316
locknitpicker wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If anything backups are the key to high availability.

Not really. Backups are complementary in disaster recovery. They play no role in high availability. Putting your data in cold storage plays no role in keeping your system up and handling traffic.

> Streaming replication lets you spin up new nodes (...)

You seem to be confused. Replication and backups are two entirely separate things. Replication is used to preserve consistency across a distributed system and improve fault tolerance, whereas backups just means you are able to recover the state of your system at each checkpoint. Either you're using a word while giving it a new personal meaning, or you're confusing concepts.

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

#515

Post by locknitpicker »

runako wrote: post #332
locknitpicker wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When AWS/GCP goes down, how do most handle HA? This is a disingenuous scenario. SQLite doesn't buy you uptime if you deploy your app to AWS/GCP, and you can just as easily deploy a proper RDBMS such as postgres to a small provider/self-host. Do you actually have any concrete scenario that supports your belief?

> SQLite doesn't buy you uptime if you deploy your app to AWS/GCP This is...not true of many hyperscaler outages? Frequently, outages will leave individual VMs running but affect only higher-order services typically used in more complex architectures. Folks running an SQLite on a EC2 often will not be affected. And obviously, don't use us-east-1. This One Simple Trick can improve your HA story.

> This is...not true of many hyperscaler outages? Frequently, outages will leave individual VMs running but affect only higher-order services typically used in more complex architectures. Folks running an SQLite on a EC2 often will not be affected.

You're trying too hard to move goalposts. Look at your comment: you're trying to argue that SQLite is immune to outages in AWS even when AWS is out, and your whole logic lies in asserting the hypothetical outage will be surgically designed to somehow not affect your deployment because it may or may not consume a service that was affected.

In the meantime, the last major AWS outage was Iran blowing up a datacenter. They should have just used SQLite to avoid that, is it?

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

#516

Post by locknitpicker »

rovr138 wrote: post #451
locknitpicker wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When AWS/GCP goes down, how do most handle HA? This is a disingenuous scenario. SQLite doesn't buy you uptime if you deploy your app to AWS/GCP, and you can just as easily deploy a proper RDBMS such as postgres to a small provider/self-host. Do you actually have any concrete scenario that supports your belief?

All I'm saying is that people mention HA, when there isn't a need for it or when most people are fine with some downtime. For example, > When AWS/GCP goes down, how do most handle HA? When they go down, what do most do? Honestly, people still go about their day and are okay. Look how many systems do go down. What ends up happening? An article goes out that X cloud took out large parts of the internet.. and that's it.…

> All I'm saying is that people mention HA, when there isn't a need for it or when most people are fine with some downtime.

I don't think it's smart to just cherry pick the design constraints you feel don't apply to you, and proceed to argue others should also ignore them.

Just because you are ok to let your pet project crash and be out for long periods of time, why do you assume it's ok for everyone to do the same?

Think about it for a second: what would be the impact of a storefront to crash during a black Friday type event? Do you think people don't get fired for dropping the ball in these circumstances? Heck, you have papers that document how a few extra milliseconds of latency in a store page is correlated to measurable drops in revenue, and here you are claiming that having businesses crash is no biggie.

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

#517

Post by andersmurphy »

locknitpicker wrote: post #514
andersmurphy wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If anything backups are the key to high availability. Not really. Backups are complementary in disaster recovery. They play no role in high availability. Putting your data in cold storage plays no role in keeping your system up and handling traffic. > Streaming replication lets you spin up new nodes (...) You seem to be confused. Replication and backups are two entirely separate things. Replication is used to prese…

Depends how you do your backups. If you do them by replicating. They are both. See litestream [1].

With SQLite this is even more obvious as a database is just a file (or three in the case of WAL). Which means you can replicate to not just another machine (or any file system) but much more resilient object storage like S3 (most cloud provider offer S3 compatible object storage).

- [1] https://litestream.io/how-it-works/

I think you might need to rethink your idée fixe.

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

#518

Post by t_mahmood »

icedchai wrote: post #512
t_mahmood wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About security, wall of shame story, Once I had Postgresql db with default password on a new vps, and forgetting to disable password based login, on a server with no domain. And it got hacked in a day, and was being used as bot server. And that was 10 years ago. Recently deployed server, and was getting ssh login attempts within an hour, and it didn't had a domain. Fortunately, I've learned my lesson, and turned of p…

I've had SSH, SMTP, POP3, HTTP, HTTPS and many other services open to the world since the 90's. I have fail2ban running. It is not that scary.

Yes, after changing the ssh port, and fail2ban on the server completely stopped those pesky ssh log in attempts.

But, on home computer, I do not want to be bothered with all the security efforts, and want to keep it simple. But I have plans to put up an isolated server setup someday. But too broke right now, and looking for a job. heh.

I have seen people, who is using simple password based authentication, with really simple password. I always go and fix that first, so, it's too common, which is why It's scary.

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

#519

Post by rtalk »

hackingonempty wrote: post #31

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

At the end of the day, revenue matter, whatever techstack is 't it

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

#520

Post by [deleted] »

hackingonempty wrote: post #31

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN