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I would love to know other peoples opinion on this. But I am coming around to the idea that self hosted(atleast partially) might be cheaper and better if you a

by capybara_2020 3y ago

I would love to know other peoples opinion on this. But I am coming around to the idea that self hosted(atleast partially) might be cheaper and better if you are a single dev/a small team. The learning curve on the tools/hosting providers out there is has become very steep. Plus the costs are unclear with a lot of cloud providers and monthly subscription charges across the services you need can quickly stack up or the prices can suddenly change. I tried deploying an app to AWS a few months back. You get a year's worth of credit when you start out. But the database I used was not covered(I did not realize all the database options were not covered). I got charged a pretty penny(Luckily it was not life shattering, but it was a shock. I hate to imagine what would have happened if I did this for a bigger app) Tried Google Analytics a few times over the last few years. But again it has become complex, so I would had to spend a ton of time learning it to even just get started. Had a few SAAS providers suddenly hike up prices or change pricing models or just shut down. We have been using dedicated servers of late. A single server seems to be able to handle multiple client apps along with hobby/test apps for a fixed price. Yes it is not as easy as putting in an email and credit card and using a service. But the price and peace of mind has been worth it. Plus we just write a few scripts to automate things. In case the work load becomes too much we can hire a person to do that and 1 person will do. Compared to having to hire a specialist for each major cloud service we use.

viraptor 3y ago
> I tried deploying an app to AWS a few months back. AWS is a toolbox you can use to construct your app deployment/hosting environment. Unless you know or want to know how to (for example) setup routing on VPCs, it may be better to go with someone actually hosting apps rather than infrastructure.
fullstackchris 3y ago
I thought (though apparently with these comments I'm in the minority) the most recent conventional wisdom has reverted to agreeing that yes, starting on self-hosted / managed servers is the best path. Seems like naysayers in here don't know how to set up a server with NGINX / SSL / whatever else you need. IMO these are _required_ experiences before trying to do it on a much more complex platform like AWS. These self managed server setup tasks are more than manageable for a small team, or even a solo dev, in a matter of a day or two. My go to 'cloud' path is just a digital ocean droplet, using docker containers to spool up whatever you need and connect it all on a docker network. A single server (2-4 cores) running quite literally ANY modern backend framework (node, go, C#) should be able to handle _thousands_ of requests per second, I'm not sure where or when this idea has disappeared, it seems like everyone automatically assumes their small SaaS or webshop needs an autoscaling kubernetes 20 rack workhorse of a server. Not the case at all!!!! Scale when you need to - if you're getting the kind of traffic where you need to, by then you won't need to worry about the added cost to do the actual scaling / upgrading. Sorry for the winded / ranty answer, I've done this like 20+ times at this point and always had to battle against the "let's put it on AWS with kubectl and 2349023 redundant instances!", when in the long run it was never needed...

viraptor 3y ago

> I tried deploying an app to AWS a few months back. AWS is a toolbox you can use to construct your app deployment/hosting environment. Unless you know or want to know how to (for example) setup routing on VPCs, it may be better to go with someone actually hosting apps rather than infrastructure.

fullstackchris 3y ago

I thought (though apparently with these comments I'm in the minority) the most recent conventional wisdom has reverted to agreeing that yes, starting on self-hosted / managed servers is the best path. Seems like naysayers in here don't know how to set up a server with NGINX / SSL / whatever else you need. IMO these are _required_ experiences before trying to do it on a much more complex platform like AWS. These self managed server setup tasks are more than manageable for a small team, or even a solo dev, in a matter of a day or two. My go to 'cloud' path is just a digital ocean droplet, using docker containers to spool up whatever you need and connect it all on a docker network. A single server (2-4 cores) running quite literally ANY modern backend framework (node, go, C#) should be able to handle _thousands_ of requests per second, I'm not sure where or when this idea has disappeared, it seems like everyone automatically assumes their small SaaS or webshop needs an autoscaling kubernetes 20 rack workhorse of a server. Not the case at all!!!! Scale when you need to - if you're getting the kind of traffic where you need to, by then you won't need to worry about the added cost to do the actual scaling / upgrading. Sorry for the winded / ranty answer, I've done this like 20+ times at this point and always had to battle against the "let's put it on AWS with kubectl and 2349023 redundant instances!", when in the long run it was never needed...