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Ignoring the fact that this sounds like an ad for Hetzner, I'm not sure this is good _generic_ advice. It may be good for _some_, but the vast majority of singl

Ignoring the fact that this sounds like an ad for Hetzner, I'm not sure this is good _generic_ advice. It may be good for _some_, but the vast majority of single SaaS founders have access to platforms now (mostly via big IaaS providers) that allow them to build, develop, and deploy without ever worrying about RAID, Apache servers or Postgresql restarts. > Plus they'll sometimes force reboot or force migrate ( =pause) your instances. Extremely rare, but probably happens at a similar rate as your "single box" dedicated provider losing an HDD or having a datacenter blip. My point here is that what you described sounds like the kinds of things SaaS developers needed to worry about ~10 years ago. The platforms of today aren't perfect, but they abstract away 90% of that and allow you to focus on business logic, which is exactly what a single SaaS developer should be doing.

heliodor 6y ago
The topic is reliability, not ease of use. What was described is not a big deal to pull off. If Hetzner fits your use case (now and future case) then it's a great way to go.
Silhouette 6y ago
As someone else who has been happily running a small business on dedicated hardware with a managed hosting service for years, I share some of the GP's scepticism about modern cloud hosting. Modern platforms should remove most of the complexity of operating routine infrastructure and allow you to focus on your business logic, but it doesn't always work out that way. Just the fact that your VMs have a significant chance of being forcibly shut down with little notice is a significant downside, for example. As a solo operator, you now have to arrange all the automatic scaling and failover configuration on your cloud host as well (possibly at considerable extra cost for capacity you might not be using 99% of the time) and you have all the 24/7/365 monitoring problems that OP was asking about. Cloud services are also notorious for obfuscating their pricing so it's hard to work out the TCO. In my experience, arguments that cloud hosting works out much cheaper overall tend to be based on rather optimistic assumptions. It might be true if you lease some VMs at carefully chosen sizes and then set everything up yourself including scaling things down again any time you don't need them. However, once you start using the automatic services that actually do something for you beyond supplying a machine on demand, the prices might jump 3x or more (sometimes much more, like orders of magnitude) compared to ordering the equivalent basic resources and setting the same functionality up manually. Then there are the security and compatibility updates. The basic cloud services tend to be provided as-is and it's up to you to ensure everything gets updated when it needs to be. Or again, you might be able to get a more automated service that does some of this for you, but it will come with a pricing premium. Meanwhile, a solo operator using a more traditional managed service probably doesn't have to worry much about any of this, because those services will often be happy to take care of things like setting up your redundant database servers or monitoring the security mailing lists and applying emergency patches very quickly so you don't have to. That's the level of individual service and advice they tend to offer to distinguish themselves from the generic cloud hosting services. Obviously you do pay extra for that management service compared to just a basic hosting arrangement, but whether you pay more than you'd have paid trying to do all of it yourself on AWS or Azure or even DO is another question.
fxtentacle 6y ago
In theory, I agree with you that cloud providers should be more comfortable and more resilient. It's just that my practical experience has been the opposite. BTW, I don't get commission, payments or anything from Hetzner. I'm just super enthusiastic about them because their affordable pricing is making me rich. I agree that it's a tradeoff, but the question was about small companies. And there I'd say 5min of occasional downtime are absolutely fine if it saves you $100k annually. And for a single founder, those 100k in profit will be kind of a big deal ;)

heliodor 6y ago

The topic is reliability, not ease of use. What was described is not a big deal to pull off. If Hetzner fits your use case (now and future case) then it's a great way to go.

Silhouette 6y ago

As someone else who has been happily running a small business on dedicated hardware with a managed hosting service for years, I share some of the GP's scepticism about modern cloud hosting. Modern platforms should remove most of the complexity of operating routine infrastructure and allow you to focus on your business logic, but it doesn't always work out that way. Just the fact that your VMs have a significant chance of being forcibly shut down with little notice is a significant downside, for example. As a solo operator, you now have to arrange all the automatic scaling and failover configuration on your cloud host as well (possibly at considerable extra cost for capacity you might not be using 99% of the time) and you have all the 24/7/365 monitoring problems that OP was asking about. Cloud services are also notorious for obfuscating their pricing so it's hard to work out the TCO. In my experience, arguments that cloud hosting works out much cheaper overall tend to be based on rather optimistic assumptions. It might be true if you lease some VMs at carefully chosen sizes and then set everything up yourself including scaling things down again any time you don't need them. However, once you start using the automatic services that actually do something for you beyond supplying a machine on demand, the prices might jump 3x or more (sometimes much more, like orders of magnitude) compared to ordering the equivalent basic resources and setting the same functionality up manually. Then there are the security and compatibility updates. The basic cloud services tend to be provided as-is and it's up to you to ensure everything gets updated when it needs to be. Or again, you might be able to get a more automated service that does some of this for you, but it will come with a pricing premium. Meanwhile, a solo operator using a more traditional managed service probably doesn't have to worry much about any of this, because those services will often be happy to take care of things like setting up your redundant database servers or monitoring the security mailing lists and applying emergency patches very quickly so you don't have to. That's the level of individual service and advice they tend to offer to distinguish themselves from the generic cloud hosting services. Obviously you do pay extra for that management service compared to just a basic hosting arrangement, but whether you pay more than you'd have paid trying to do all of it yourself on AWS or Azure or even DO is another question.

fxtentacle 6y ago

In theory, I agree with you that cloud providers should be more comfortable and more resilient. It's just that my practical experience has been the opposite. BTW, I don't get commission, payments or anything from Hetzner. I'm just super enthusiastic about them because their affordable pricing is making me rich. I agree that it's a tradeoff, but the question was about small companies. And there I'd say 5min of occasional downtime are absolutely fine if it saves you $100k annually. And for a single founder, those 100k in profit will be kind of a big deal ;)