5 ms·

So true, which is why I find it kind of awkward when I say to young developers/business owners they should pay for a professional PostgreSQL hosting and they ar

by tzaman 10y ago

So true, which is why I find it kind of awkward when I say to young developers/business owners they should pay for a professional PostgreSQL hosting and they argue it's open source and they can host their DBs on a $25 (or less) Digital Ocean instance. Until it's too late, I guess.

sandGorgon 10y ago
here's a question - other than RDS, which other PG hosting would you recommend ?
- why-el 10y ago
  PG has an good list in their website: https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/
- pjlegato 10y ago
  Try us! https://www.databaselabs.io/ https://www.databaselabs.io/ . Professional PG hosting in Google, AWS, and DigitalOcean. Happy to discuss more details -- pjlegato at databaselabs.io.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    good to know. i just checked out your website on my phone . i have to do a google login auth before i can see pricing? i wanted to see what you offer... replication strategy, etc EDIT: I just went to your desktop website and can see pricing. Do you do failover ? AWS RDS does failover and high availability - which makes it worth it. If you can do high availability on digitalocean. That will be killer.
    - tzaman 10y ago
      You can do HA on DigitalOcean, the question is whether you should do it yourself, and in most cases, the answer is a big NO.
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      Doh. It looks like pricing is broken on mobile. Sorry about that! We're on it. Yes, we set up and run autofailover upon request. It's getting rolled into the UI this month. In the meantime, write support@databaselabs.io and we'll turn that on for you manually.
whitepoplar 10y ago
What companies do you think offer the most competent Postgres hosting?
- rch 10y ago
  I've been happy with Amazon RDS.
hinkley 10y ago
Precautionary principle. Multiply the odds of the problem by the costs of the problem. If a DO outage would cost you millions of dollars, then it will be much, much cheaper to spend $250,000 a year to fix a problem than it will be to deal with the consequences. The problem is that most software developers are gamblers, and most businesses encourage that behavior. Some even cultivate it. We take stupid risks all the time and when we don't get caught we think that means that none of our actions have consequences. And mostly those people are right. Stock options pay off so infrequently and so inconsistently that they are a poor incentive for long term thinking. In fact the only time I ever got any money out of options was because of a pump and dump by the founders (aka an acquisition). Even the worst developers I've worked with would take 3-5 years to drive a company into the ground, unless nobody else was paying any attention at all. And when the company folds, they've still got years of take-home pay and they just have to find a new job.
pjlegato 10y ago
We (databaselabs.io) are the first Postgres as a Service on DigitalOcean. We fight this sales battle on a daily basis. The problem is that younger devs/owners are much less likely to have ever experienced any significant outage, so it's a non-issue for them. They can't see why they should pay good money to prevent it. We've had much better results with slightly older and more experienced people, who realize that our service is an absolute bargain compared to the cost and risk of attempting to run continuous backups, etc. themselves.
- amirmansour 10y ago
  How are you guaranteeing 100% uptime if your service relies on third-party infrastructures?
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    100% uptime is a financial guarantee: if it's up for less than 100% of the time (other than scheduled maintenance), we refund 30x that amount, up to 1 months' fees. We used to have a more engineery 99.95% uptime guarantee, but customers empirically prefer the financial guarantee over that.
- aa_memon 10y ago
  i am curious, you are commenting on a post about secure postgres but after signing up for your service i see that the database i created is publicly available, on the standard port 5432, with the default postgres username. the only thing stopping me is a password, no certificate required. i am not a postgres expert but how is this not extremely insecure?
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    "Extremely" insecure is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not as though the password is "password" on all the databases. We do support certificate-based logins and firewalls with IP whitelists. They're just not on by default. Frankly, the reason is because almost all customers don't care about having a very high level of security if that implies doing more work (setting up certificates, whitelisting IPs.) Moreover, they actively prefer to have "simpler and less secure" over "more complex and more secure." We've done experiments with certificates and firewall IP whitelists and so on. Almost all customers and potential customers reject these things. They say they want a simple password that just works from anywhere. We had to choose between being slightly less secure and having customers, versus being highly secure and having no customers. Since the business can't survive without any customers, that choice was easy. That said, if you do want any of those things turned on for your database, just write support@databaselabs.io.

by tzaman 10y ago

sandGorgon 10y ago

here's a question - other than RDS, which other PG hosting would you recommend ?

why-el 10y ago
PG has an good list in their website: https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/
pjlegato 10y ago
Try us! https://www.databaselabs.io/ https://www.databaselabs.io/ . Professional PG hosting in Google, AWS, and DigitalOcean. Happy to discuss more details -- pjlegato at databaselabs.io.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  good to know. i just checked out your website on my phone . i have to do a google login auth before i can see pricing? i wanted to see what you offer... replication strategy, etc EDIT: I just went to your desktop website and can see pricing. Do you do failover ? AWS RDS does failover and high availability - which makes it worth it. If you can do high availability on digitalocean. That will be killer.
  - tzaman 10y ago
    You can do HA on DigitalOcean, the question is whether you should do it yourself, and in most cases, the answer is a big NO.
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    Doh. It looks like pricing is broken on mobile. Sorry about that! We're on it. Yes, we set up and run autofailover upon request. It's getting rolled into the UI this month. In the meantime, write support@databaselabs.io and we'll turn that on for you manually.

whitepoplar 10y ago

What companies do you think offer the most competent Postgres hosting?

rch 10y ago
I've been happy with Amazon RDS.

hinkley 10y ago

Precautionary principle. Multiply the odds of the problem by the costs of the problem. If a DO outage would cost you millions of dollars, then it will be much, much cheaper to spend $250,000 a year to fix a problem than it will be to deal with the consequences. The problem is that most software developers are gamblers, and most businesses encourage that behavior. Some even cultivate it. We take stupid risks all the time and when we don't get caught we think that means that none of our actions have consequences. And mostly those people are right. Stock options pay off so infrequently and so inconsistently that they are a poor incentive for long term thinking. In fact the only time I ever got any money out of options was because of a pump and dump by the founders (aka an acquisition). Even the worst developers I've worked with would take 3-5 years to drive a company into the ground, unless nobody else was paying any attention at all. And when the company folds, they've still got years of take-home pay and they just have to find a new job.

pjlegato 10y ago

We (databaselabs.io) are the first Postgres as a Service on DigitalOcean. We fight this sales battle on a daily basis. The problem is that younger devs/owners are much less likely to have ever experienced any significant outage, so it's a non-issue for them. They can't see why they should pay good money to prevent it. We've had much better results with slightly older and more experienced people, who realize that our service is an absolute bargain compared to the cost and risk of attempting to run continuous backups, etc. themselves.

amirmansour 10y ago
How are you guaranteeing 100% uptime if your service relies on third-party infrastructures?
- pjlegato 10y ago
  100% uptime is a financial guarantee: if it's up for less than 100% of the time (other than scheduled maintenance), we refund 30x that amount, up to 1 months' fees. We used to have a more engineery 99.95% uptime guarantee, but customers empirically prefer the financial guarantee over that.
aa_memon 10y ago
i am curious, you are commenting on a post about secure postgres but after signing up for your service i see that the database i created is publicly available, on the standard port 5432, with the default postgres username. the only thing stopping me is a password, no certificate required. i am not a postgres expert but how is this not extremely insecure?
- pjlegato 10y ago
  "Extremely" insecure is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not as though the password is "password" on all the databases. We do support certificate-based logins and firewalls with IP whitelists. They're just not on by default. Frankly, the reason is because almost all customers don't care about having a very high level of security if that implies doing more work (setting up certificates, whitelisting IPs.) Moreover, they actively prefer to have "simpler and less secure" over "more complex and more secure." We've done experiments with certificates and firewall IP whitelists and so on. Almost all customers and potential customers reject these things. They say they want a simple password that just works from anywhere. We had to choose between being slightly less secure and having customers, versus being highly secure and having no customers. Since the business can't survive without any customers, that choice was easy. That said, if you do want any of those things turned on for your database, just write support@databaselabs.io.