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One of the craziest parts of this article to me is the sheer number of technologies he picked right off the bat to implement the service. Datadog? Digital Ocean

One of the craziest parts of this article to me is the sheer number of technologies he picked right off the bat to implement the service. Datadog? Digital Ocean? Wal-e? If he had gone with a cloud provider like AWS he probably could have cut that list by 2/3 by just using built in solutions.

paulgb 7y ago
I get your point, but for what it's worth, I moved a service from AWS Lambda to a Digital Ocean Dokku box and the amount of complexity I had to deal with went down dramatically and hosting costs dropped (I was getting enough traffic to break out of the free tier).
madamelic 7y ago
Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout, slap an email address on the page and there's your logging and error system. AWS is massively overcomplicated for an indie SaaS business, and it costs way, way too much. You can have a box with plenty of room for $5 - $10 / month and it takes about 25 seconds to launch it. I had 20k concurrent users with a $5 server and Cloudflare. Other people are using serverless solutions, which drive the price even lower. The author stated as much: keep it simple and boring. He thought he was going boring for a SaaS, but he went way too exciting for what an indie SaaS needs.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  > Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc? Getting root access to a barebones linux install is conceptually "not complex". But that is only because it pushed all the actual complex stuff up the food chain and into your head. A head that needs to be thinking about everything but how to configure apache or the load balancer or postgresql. > keep it simple and boring Installing a web server from a package manager and configuring it in a repeatable way is not simple and boring. A single person startup doesn't have the bandwidth to do that.
  - jjice 7y ago
    I don't know if I've been doing something wrong now. For my personal web apps, I've always just installed Nginx, Let's Encrypt, and then a docker image of my application/DB. Spinning this up on a fresh Ubuntu Server install takes less than a half hour if I had to guess. Nginx to force TLS and proxy pass to my docket image. I'm not trying to be rude, just genuinely curious if I'm missing something complex that could be making my services less secure.
    - tnolet 7y ago
      Heroku does that in 3 minutes. And maintains & updates that stack for you. And gives you deployment automation etc. For $7 a month.
      - spookthesunset 7y ago
        Exactly. Deployment is merely a "git push" away. It is amazing how simple it is to get started building a new product. Every second you spend configuring web servers and stuff is a second you should be spending adding value to your business.
        dijit 7y ago
        Deployment /can be/ a git push away, but that's only on the extreme end with things like heroku. You mentioned cloud. Cloud has cost sinks every so often (in terms of time). Cloud has much value but please dont' consider it a panacea. You can get a lot of value out of those 30 minutes installing a webserver; and it can save you a significant amount of cost. Not to mention when you want to actually scale you'll see the reason why pretty clearly, unlike in cloud providers where inefficiencies can just suck up money until you notice. And I definitely take exception to the "every _second_ you spend doing something other than business is a waste" because by that logic I shouldn't use the bathroom or take time to have a coffee.
        spookthesunset 7y ago
spookthesunset 7y ago
For a startup, something like heroku is perfect. Course, my opinion is formed based on data 5 years out of date. Now days I'm sure there is something that abstracts things even more.
rooam-dev 7y ago
I think it will be more like replace 2/3 with AWS* service.
fulafel 7y ago
The items on his list are on average easier to set up and learn than the equivalent on AWS. Something that's more geared towards getting you up and running quickly (eg Heroku) might be another story.

paulgb 7y ago

I get your point, but for what it's worth, I moved a service from AWS Lambda to a Digital Ocean Dokku box and the amount of complexity I had to deal with went down dramatically and hosting costs dropped (I was getting enough traffic to break out of the free tier).

madamelic 7y ago

Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout, slap an email address on the page and there's your logging and error system. AWS is massively overcomplicated for an indie SaaS business, and it costs way, way too much. You can have a box with plenty of room for $5 - $10 / month and it takes about 25 seconds to launch it. I had 20k concurrent users with a $5 server and Cloudflare. Other people are using serverless solutions, which drive the price even lower. The author stated as much: keep it simple and boring. He thought he was going boring for a SaaS, but he went way too exciting for what an indie SaaS needs.

spookthesunset 7y ago
> Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc? Getting root access to a barebones linux install is conceptually "not complex". But that is only because it pushed all the actual complex stuff up the food chain and into your head. A head that needs to be thinking about everything but how to configure apache or the load balancer or postgresql. > keep it simple and boring Installing a web server from a package manager and configuring it in a repeatable way is not simple and boring. A single person startup doesn't have the bandwidth to do that.
- jjice 7y ago
  I don't know if I've been doing something wrong now. For my personal web apps, I've always just installed Nginx, Let's Encrypt, and then a docker image of my application/DB. Spinning this up on a fresh Ubuntu Server install takes less than a half hour if I had to guess. Nginx to force TLS and proxy pass to my docket image. I'm not trying to be rude, just genuinely curious if I'm missing something complex that could be making my services less secure.
  - tnolet 7y ago
    Heroku does that in 3 minutes. And maintains & updates that stack for you. And gives you deployment automation etc. For $7 a month.
    - spookthesunset 7y ago
      Exactly. Deployment is merely a "git push" away. It is amazing how simple it is to get started building a new product. Every second you spend configuring web servers and stuff is a second you should be spending adding value to your business.
      - dijit 7y ago
        Deployment /can be/ a git push away, but that's only on the extreme end with things like heroku. You mentioned cloud. Cloud has cost sinks every so often (in terms of time). Cloud has much value but please dont' consider it a panacea. You can get a lot of value out of those 30 minutes installing a webserver; and it can save you a significant amount of cost. Not to mention when you want to actually scale you'll see the reason why pretty clearly, unlike in cloud providers where inefficiencies can just suck up money until you notice. And I definitely take exception to the "every _second_ you spend doing something other than business is a waste" because by that logic I shouldn't use the bathroom or take time to have a coffee.
        spookthesunset 7y ago

spookthesunset 7y ago

For a startup, something like heroku is perfect. Course, my opinion is formed based on data 5 years out of date. Now days I'm sure there is something that abstracts things even more.

rooam-dev 7y ago

I think it will be more like replace 2/3 with AWS* service.

fulafel 7y ago

The items on his list are on average easier to set up and learn than the equivalent on AWS. Something that's more geared towards getting you up and running quickly (eg Heroku) might be another story.