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Not to sound mean, but if there aren't posts/blogs/whatever explicitly telling people how to minimize costs... then they'll continue to follow the ones that mak

Not to sound mean, but if there aren't posts/blogs/whatever explicitly telling people how to minimize costs... then they'll continue to follow the ones that make them pay $100+.

rapsey 6y ago
Or people could do some quick research what options there are. Not everything needs to be spoon fed.
fock 6y ago
basically most people don't do that for saving costs, but just because it makes sense to them. And there's lots of tutorials explaining how to run your own webapp.
TekMol 6y ago
Ok, here is a quick tutorial: Step 1: Copy Peter Levels stack: https://www.nocsdegree.com/pieter-levels-learn-coding/ https://www.nocsdegree.com/pieter-levels-learn-coding/ If he serves hundreds of thousands of monthly users and makes a million a month with a single VPS, you certainly won't have scaling issues when you start out or just have tens of thousands of users. Step 2: If you really scale beyond that, resist the urge to bloat your stack. Think long and hard about every piece you add to it. Really understand each piece you add to it. Don't fall into the trap of paid services. Don't fall into the trap of "best practices".
- chillfox 6y ago
  I don’t know how many times I have seen “best practices” used as excuse to avoid thinking. Usually by people who don’t even have the problem that the supposed “best practices” is meant to solve.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  > PHP (He doesn't use any frameworks like Laravel) I wouldn't want to read (or write) that code, but thanks for the article.
  - paul_f 6y ago
    Well, aren't you special. How about staying on topic and not dropping in this, what, developer virtue signaling?
    - afarrell 6y ago
      > staying on topic A major subtopic of this thread is "different situations call for different setups." Saying "I won't work with PHP" is like saying "Gluten will make me shit my brains out." It is not virtue signalling.
- tsumnia 6y ago
  While this article has steps in the right direction, it's a lot of "use this thing". I operate a simple Flask/PostgreSQL webapp for CS Education through the luxury of my university. If/When I graduate from my program, what are the aspects I can do to minimize my costs for hosting the app? Of course I'll look for best approaches but why does that need to be forbidden knowledge known to a select few? Its an aside, but the mentality of "let them figure it out" is a major issue in education. Foundational knowledge should be easy to acquire so I can worry about higher level thinking issues. Literally spending hours trying to figure out how to set things up through hours of Googling doesn't really help that, nor does it promote the "figuring it out" people think it does - its just stumbling upon the right set of commands that let me move past this particular hurdle. From the devops perspective, what about telling someone how to set up their own server to do/minimize X is so taxing?
  - richiecute 6y ago
    I run a cheap website and here is what I do - cloudflare free tier for caching, DNS, page rules, etc - run everything on one VPS(digital ocean, linode, etc) pick cheapest that has specs you need - any non-trivial storage (media, big files) move to Backblaze B2 it's cheap (you can use free tier cloudflare workers to redirect to B2 for free bandwidth due to Bandwitdth Alliance) - free static page from Netifly (I can redirect to this with cloudflare in case my VPS falls over or something to provide info/links) - If I want to look at logs or something I rsync it my local machine (if I cared I could set up a process to push logs/backup etc to private B2 bucket) You may not need exact same setup, I am optimizing for caching and cheap storage because my site stores/serves lots of media files.
  - yabai_yatsu 6y ago
    >Literally spending hours trying to figure out how to set things up through hours of Googling doesn't really help that, nor does it promote the "figuring it out" people think it does - its just stumbling upon the right set of commands that let me move past this particular hurdle. That's basically all of software development for your entire career. Never not had a day or a week not like that.
    - 6y ago
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Haha, the man is clearly a beast of a product designer and executor. I don't think I would succeed with the same tools. Honestly, spending $200/mo is insignificant to me. And I'm pretty happy to answer the question of "Why can this guy build this thing on a single VPS and you can't?" with "Well, because he's better than me". I can be up in 15 mins on Heroku with a Rails+React web app. And in an hour have a thing. Or for a static no-login thing, faster with Netlify. But it doesn't matter. Because I never made a product as nice as the one he made. If the outcome is I'm -$200/mo that is irrelevant to me. If the outcome is I'm +$50k/mo that is very relevant. So I'm going to optimize for how I can do the latter.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  If I have a "million a month" business (which is coming from rich recruitijg fees on a trivial website, not amazing tech), no way am I sweating $171/mo in server bills.
aahortwwy 6y ago
Don't do blue-green deploys when you have no revenue. Downtime costs you nothing and at 3,400 visitors a day you'll be lucky to drop a single request while deploying. Pre-compute and cache to reduce your need for beefy servers. When you can run something on your machine or in the cloud, choose your machine. EDIT: It's less about saving money and more about not spending it. EDIT2: Forgot to mention: use SQLite.
- chillfox 6y ago
  SQLite Really is a bit of a hidden gem.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    Not really hidden when it is one of the most widely deployed pieces of software on the planet.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      Sure, but as an underlying dependency for iOS/Android, it's pretty well hidden from casual users...
      - krtkush 6y ago
        That's true for even a casual website user. They have no idea or care about the underlying database. Every app developer is aware about SQLite.
    - chillfox 6y ago
      I guess not in absolute terms, but it’s mostly overlooked for web apps.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  Caching is, in general, a good thing. But it's worth thinking about how you do it. I recently sped up a large system by dropping the use of redis entirely - because it was being badly used. During a single request there might be 50+ cache-lookups, each taking a round-trip to a remote redis server to fetch a single key at a time. Batching those up to a set/hash would have been more efficient, but the codebase had evolved in such a way as to make that difficult. Instead of making 50+ redis fetches it turned out that just fetching all the stuff from the database was faster. (There will be refactoring to batch up the key fetches, but for the moment there was a measurable increase in performance under current loads just by removing redis.)

Not to sound mean, but if there aren't posts/blogs/whatever explicitly telling people how to minimize costs... then they'll continue to follow the ones that make them pay $100+.

rapsey 6y ago

Or people could do some quick research what options there are. Not everything needs to be spoon fed.

fock 6y ago

basically most people don't do that for saving costs, but just because it makes sense to them. And there's lots of tutorials explaining how to run your own webapp.

TekMol 6y ago

Ok, here is a quick tutorial: Step 1: Copy Peter Levels stack: https://www.nocsdegree.com/pieter-levels-learn-coding/ https://www.nocsdegree.com/pieter-levels-learn-coding/ If he serves hundreds of thousands of monthly users and makes a million a month with a single VPS, you certainly won't have scaling issues when you start out or just have tens of thousands of users. Step 2: If you really scale beyond that, resist the urge to bloat your stack. Think long and hard about every piece you add to it. Really understand each piece you add to it. Don't fall into the trap of paid services. Don't fall into the trap of "best practices".

chillfox 6y ago
I don’t know how many times I have seen “best practices” used as excuse to avoid thinking. Usually by people who don’t even have the problem that the supposed “best practices” is meant to solve.
young_unixer 6y ago
> PHP (He doesn't use any frameworks like Laravel) I wouldn't want to read (or write) that code, but thanks for the article.
- paul_f 6y ago
  Well, aren't you special. How about staying on topic and not dropping in this, what, developer virtue signaling?
  - afarrell 6y ago
    > staying on topic A major subtopic of this thread is "different situations call for different setups." Saying "I won't work with PHP" is like saying "Gluten will make me shit my brains out." It is not virtue signalling.
tsumnia 6y ago
While this article has steps in the right direction, it's a lot of "use this thing". I operate a simple Flask/PostgreSQL webapp for CS Education through the luxury of my university. If/When I graduate from my program, what are the aspects I can do to minimize my costs for hosting the app? Of course I'll look for best approaches but why does that need to be forbidden knowledge known to a select few? Its an aside, but the mentality of "let them figure it out" is a major issue in education. Foundational knowledge should be easy to acquire so I can worry about higher level thinking issues. Literally spending hours trying to figure out how to set things up through hours of Googling doesn't really help that, nor does it promote the "figuring it out" people think it does - its just stumbling upon the right set of commands that let me move past this particular hurdle. From the devops perspective, what about telling someone how to set up their own server to do/minimize X is so taxing?
- richiecute 6y ago
  I run a cheap website and here is what I do - cloudflare free tier for caching, DNS, page rules, etc - run everything on one VPS(digital ocean, linode, etc) pick cheapest that has specs you need - any non-trivial storage (media, big files) move to Backblaze B2 it's cheap (you can use free tier cloudflare workers to redirect to B2 for free bandwidth due to Bandwitdth Alliance) - free static page from Netifly (I can redirect to this with cloudflare in case my VPS falls over or something to provide info/links) - If I want to look at logs or something I rsync it my local machine (if I cared I could set up a process to push logs/backup etc to private B2 bucket) You may not need exact same setup, I am optimizing for caching and cheap storage because my site stores/serves lots of media files.
- yabai_yatsu 6y ago
  >Literally spending hours trying to figure out how to set things up through hours of Googling doesn't really help that, nor does it promote the "figuring it out" people think it does - its just stumbling upon the right set of commands that let me move past this particular hurdle. That's basically all of software development for your entire career. Never not had a day or a week not like that.
  - 6y ago
renewiltord 6y ago
Haha, the man is clearly a beast of a product designer and executor. I don't think I would succeed with the same tools. Honestly, spending $200/mo is insignificant to me. And I'm pretty happy to answer the question of "Why can this guy build this thing on a single VPS and you can't?" with "Well, because he's better than me". I can be up in 15 mins on Heroku with a Rails+React web app. And in an hour have a thing. Or for a static no-login thing, faster with Netlify. But it doesn't matter. Because I never made a product as nice as the one he made. If the outcome is I'm -$200/mo that is irrelevant to me. If the outcome is I'm +$50k/mo that is very relevant. So I'm going to optimize for how I can do the latter.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
If I have a "million a month" business (which is coming from rich recruitijg fees on a trivial website, not amazing tech), no way am I sweating $171/mo in server bills.

aahortwwy 6y ago

Don't do blue-green deploys when you have no revenue. Downtime costs you nothing and at 3,400 visitors a day you'll be lucky to drop a single request while deploying. Pre-compute and cache to reduce your need for beefy servers. When you can run something on your machine or in the cloud, choose your machine. EDIT: It's less about saving money and more about not spending it. EDIT2: Forgot to mention: use SQLite.

chillfox 6y ago
SQLite Really is a bit of a hidden gem.
- rapsey 6y ago
  Not really hidden when it is one of the most widely deployed pieces of software on the planet.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Sure, but as an underlying dependency for iOS/Android, it's pretty well hidden from casual users...
    - krtkush 6y ago
      That's true for even a casual website user. They have no idea or care about the underlying database. Every app developer is aware about SQLite.
  - chillfox 6y ago
    I guess not in absolute terms, but it’s mostly overlooked for web apps.
stevekemp 6y ago
Caching is, in general, a good thing. But it's worth thinking about how you do it. I recently sped up a large system by dropping the use of redis entirely - because it was being badly used. During a single request there might be 50+ cache-lookups, each taking a round-trip to a remote redis server to fetch a single key at a time. Batching those up to a set/hash would have been more efficient, but the codebase had evolved in such a way as to make that difficult. Instead of making 50+ redis fetches it turned out that just fetching all the stuff from the database was faster. (There will be refactoring to batch up the key fetches, but for the moment there was a measurable increase in performance under current loads just by removing redis.)