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I do not usually comment on Hacker News, but heck, I am actually proud of what I am building this time. I run an open-source WordPress hosting company focused o

I do not usually comment on Hacker News, but heck, I am actually proud of what I am building this time. I run an open-source WordPress hosting company focused on privacy — well, kinda, it is in closed beta —, so my stack is, maybe, a little boring. Dedicated AMD 32 core RAID 10 servers from Hetzner running LXD for customer containers — seven containers per server on the cheapest plan. Each dedicated server has their filesystem encrypted with LUKS — including /boot — and each container runs the "default" WordPress stack, i.e., NGINX, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, Redis, ElasticSearch, Postfix, WP-CLI, fail2ban, monit, aide, etc. WordPress is modified to leak less data by default — heck, by default you can use their REST API to get the email of anyone who leaves a comment —, have a better-looking dashboard experience, and each container runs a TOR bridge to help people in oppressive regimes. All servers run a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, resolve DNS queries using one of my 8 DNSCrypt servers, are managed using on-premise Canonical Landscape and connect to a Hashicorp Vault instance for credentials and whatnot. Backups are handled by another big Hetzner server — sitting at 60 TB of storage right now —, by Rsync.net in their Switzerland location and by another server in my house. All backups are encrypted by default, but I still need to implement a way to test them to make sure they work. The customer portal is being built with Laravel and will connect to the Hashicorp Vault instance to get credentials for customers. We didn't choose the payment gateway yet, as the company is incorporated in Romania and options are kinda scarce, but we will probably go with Adyen and BitPay, which will connect to our Invoice Ninja instance. The onboarding process for new customers is handled with Jitsi Meet — again, another Hetzner server. The help desk was initially handled by Help Scout, but I migrated to Full Help recently — which I found on Hacker News —, and I could not be happier. The developer behind it is super awesome and went as far as adding GPG encryption and Postmark support when I asked for it. I do have six other partners, but as I am currently building everything out myself, I guess it qualifies as a company of one? Partners will be responsible for different parts of the business, i.e., legal, documentation, and whatnot.

madamelic 7y ago
>my stack is, maybe, a little boring. >Dedicated AMD 32 core RAID 10 servers from Hetzner running LXD for customer containers — seven containers per server on the cheapest plan. Each dedicated server has their filesystem encrypted with LUKS — including /boot >All servers run a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, resolve DNS queries using one of my 8 DNSCrypt servers, are managed using on-premise Canonical Landscape and connect to a Hashicorp Vault instance for credentials and whatnot. >Backups are handled by another big Hetzner server — sitting at 60 TB of storage right now ... I'd love to see what you consider exciting! Just a side note, do you all have revenue? This seems very overbuilt for a private beta product.
- jamesponddotco 7y ago
  > ... I'd love to see what you consider exciting! I mean, in the age of Kubernetes and AWS, having your entire stack running on a single server does sound kinda dull to most people. I rather have the performance and simplicity, though. > Just a side note, do you all have revenue? This seems very overbuilt for a private beta product. Yes. All customers on the private beta have a 50% discount, but our profit margin is pretty high, to be honest. The "Medium" plan, which is where all tests are happening, cost us €215,88 per month, which includes the dedicated server, one IP address for each LXD container, about 700 GB of bandwidth from BunnyCDN and emails by Mailgun. In that plan, we offer 16 GB of ECC memory and 240 GB of NVMe storage. One of our competitors charge $1500 per month for 200 GB of storage, our price is €599.00 per month. So even with high-profit margins, our cost is below our competition. Which makes you wonder how much profit they make. But, of course, none of this account for operational costs, employee costs, SaaS costs and things like premium plugins which are offered by default and CDN bandwidth above 700GB — which realistically speaking, will be higher for some customers.
  - eb0la 7y ago
    Kubernetes and wordpress is not that simple. Might be sexy, but not simple. For me, the stopper is WP is thought to be used inside a server with _mutable_ access to everything; whilst k8s needs containers. This looks good for day-to-day use until you realize your wp needs updating and needs to be done by the operator/editor and somehow propagated back to the system that builds the container. Usually this is an air gap.
    - jamesponddotco 7y ago
      I dislike Kubernetes in general, and much prefer something like LXD for WordPress. My point was that most people consider my way of doing things "boring", while everything else, i.e., serverless technology, is over hyped.
eb0la 7y ago
I run a small publication (7K users/mo) with my wife (a Journalist) on digital ocean VPS. I have cloudflare setup on top and a custom backup plugin for wordpress. I am now considering the kubernetes route to split the editing and frontend workflows.

madamelic 7y ago

>my stack is, maybe, a little boring. >Dedicated AMD 32 core RAID 10 servers from Hetzner running LXD for customer containers — seven containers per server on the cheapest plan. Each dedicated server has their filesystem encrypted with LUKS — including /boot >All servers run a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, resolve DNS queries using one of my 8 DNSCrypt servers, are managed using on-premise Canonical Landscape and connect to a Hashicorp Vault instance for credentials and whatnot. >Backups are handled by another big Hetzner server — sitting at 60 TB of storage right now ... I'd love to see what you consider exciting! Just a side note, do you all have revenue? This seems very overbuilt for a private beta product.

jamesponddotco 7y ago
> ... I'd love to see what you consider exciting! I mean, in the age of Kubernetes and AWS, having your entire stack running on a single server does sound kinda dull to most people. I rather have the performance and simplicity, though. > Just a side note, do you all have revenue? This seems very overbuilt for a private beta product. Yes. All customers on the private beta have a 50% discount, but our profit margin is pretty high, to be honest. The "Medium" plan, which is where all tests are happening, cost us €215,88 per month, which includes the dedicated server, one IP address for each LXD container, about 700 GB of bandwidth from BunnyCDN and emails by Mailgun. In that plan, we offer 16 GB of ECC memory and 240 GB of NVMe storage. One of our competitors charge $1500 per month for 200 GB of storage, our price is €599.00 per month. So even with high-profit margins, our cost is below our competition. Which makes you wonder how much profit they make. But, of course, none of this account for operational costs, employee costs, SaaS costs and things like premium plugins which are offered by default and CDN bandwidth above 700GB — which realistically speaking, will be higher for some customers.
- eb0la 7y ago
  Kubernetes and wordpress is not that simple. Might be sexy, but not simple. For me, the stopper is WP is thought to be used inside a server with _mutable_ access to everything; whilst k8s needs containers. This looks good for day-to-day use until you realize your wp needs updating and needs to be done by the operator/editor and somehow propagated back to the system that builds the container. Usually this is an air gap.
  - jamesponddotco 7y ago
    I dislike Kubernetes in general, and much prefer something like LXD for WordPress. My point was that most people consider my way of doing things "boring", while everything else, i.e., serverless technology, is over hyped.

eb0la 7y ago

I run a small publication (7K users/mo) with my wife (a Journalist) on digital ocean VPS. I have cloudflare setup on top and a custom backup plugin for wordpress. I am now considering the kubernetes route to split the editing and frontend workflows.