5 ms·

Hetzner 2vCPU 4GB RAM 40gb: €4.50 per month. Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing. Automate snapsho

Hetzner 2vCPU 4GB RAM 40gb: €4.50 per month. Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing. Automate snapshots for backups: €0.0131/GB per month.

tossandthrow 2y ago
Not entirely managed and worry free.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  I like you think some DBaaS vendor is reading this, thinking of how to offer an always-on fully managed, backed up, and replicated database for $2/mo. Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    > Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2. I agree. But... Reading the OPs post in the most favourable light, it sounds like what he'd like would be the existing "free" service, but to have a wait to pay for it in an attempt to ensure it'll still be worthwhile for the company to keep it running long term. They say 'the cost for an "active but lightly used database" is somewhere between $1 and $2.5 per month.' so it's at least the right order of magnitude. But one single support call to an entitled "paying customer" blows away any benefit here, so you're probably right that it's a bad idea.
    - hipadev23 2y ago
      The thing is free are just customers you haven’t upsold yet. You can always boot them off your platform eventually, and they cant really complain, cause it’s free tier and it never lasts, and most everyone recognizes that. But accept $2? Now you’re knowingly taking money from a cheapass, and you owe them some level of service, support, and commitment as they’re paying you. Free customers are worth so much more than $2 customers.
    - chillfox 2y ago
      Some sort of service targeting hobby projects could possibly work if the support is a community forum. Guess you would have to do yearly billing to not have it all eaten by processing fees.
    - antifa 2y ago
      Then don't offer support for bottom tier customers.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Too 2y ago
    It should be possible to pay for something while still having “best effort under shared resources” as the expected service level. Compare local bus tickets vs taking a cab. The taxi costs 20x more, but in the best case scenario, they provide exactly the same value! If the bus is late, cold or overcrowded, I have no expectations to get refunded or even an apology. I just have to suck it up. This happens rarely enough that I still accept it and hand over my trust to them. There is no illusion that my $2 bus ticket alone is enough to keep the bus running, in contrast with the cab. (Bus companies having a tough time to profit is an orthagonal issue, taxi drivers struggle a lot too)
- dspillett 2y ago
  > Not entirely managed and worry free. Which is where a lot of the extra cost comes from. Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task. Some of your costs of doing business won't scale down perfectly beyond a certain point so you won't make nearly as much from 1000 2$ customers as you will 100 $20 ones. The same for numerous technical matters. And that is before you think about SLAs and support - you might have realistic views on what to expect for $2 but having worked at the cheap end of web hosting I can assure you that a great many will not, especially at times when things don't go 100% right.
  - riku_iki 2y ago
    > Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task. the hope is that some customers will grow and bring more revenue from more expensive plans and services.
- arp242 2y ago
  What you want for $2/month is unreasonable. I pay more than double for FastMail. As the article explains, it won't even cover the base hardware costs. So you won't be "paying your part". The only reason to offer something like this is to "up-sell" to an actual properly paid plan, and since you will also lose quite a large percentage to payment processor fees, have extra support/admin overhead, deal with users who now feel entitles to "paid support", having a $1 or $2/month price point is just not worth it. You will either need pay for it, or do it yourself on a cheap Linode VPS or Hetzner machine or whatnot.
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    I pay myself for Fastmail and think that is a reasonable price. 2$ was a number, 4 or 5 would probably also do. Just something that can some out of the latte budget.
    - drekipus 2y ago
      Do you pay $5 a month for lattes, or $20 a month for lattes?
raverbashing 2y ago
Why do you even need docker for that? Just use systemd and cgroups to manage it.
- vasco 2y ago
  It's not why do you need it, it's that there's 2000 people that know how to do it with docker for every person that knows how to do it with cgroups. And your question is probably just signaling you're in the second group (I'm in the first).
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Skill issue ig. The ease of portability and I like Swarm a lot.
- Modified3019 2y ago
  Would be curious about any tutorials you recommend on doing that.
  - rascul 2y ago
    Systemd runs things in cgroups by default, so installing the postgres package from your systemd distro's official repos and ensuring that is enabled and running will get you postgres in cgroups to start with. From there you can check the systemd.resource-control(5) man page for some potentially interesting tunables.

Hetzner 2vCPU 4GB RAM 40gb: €4.50 per month. Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing. Automate snapshots for backups: €0.0131/GB per month.

tossandthrow 2y ago

Not entirely managed and worry free.

hipadev23 2y ago
I like you think some DBaaS vendor is reading this, thinking of how to offer an always-on fully managed, backed up, and replicated database for $2/mo. Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2.
- bigiain 2y ago
  > Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2. I agree. But... Reading the OPs post in the most favourable light, it sounds like what he'd like would be the existing "free" service, but to have a wait to pay for it in an attempt to ensure it'll still be worthwhile for the company to keep it running long term. They say 'the cost for an "active but lightly used database" is somewhere between $1 and $2.5 per month.' so it's at least the right order of magnitude. But one single support call to an entitled "paying customer" blows away any benefit here, so you're probably right that it's a bad idea.
  - hipadev23 2y ago
    The thing is free are just customers you haven’t upsold yet. You can always boot them off your platform eventually, and they cant really complain, cause it’s free tier and it never lasts, and most everyone recognizes that. But accept $2? Now you’re knowingly taking money from a cheapass, and you owe them some level of service, support, and commitment as they’re paying you. Free customers are worth so much more than $2 customers.
  - chillfox 2y ago
    Some sort of service targeting hobby projects could possibly work if the support is a community forum. Guess you would have to do yearly billing to not have it all eaten by processing fees.
  - antifa 2y ago
    Then don't offer support for bottom tier customers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Too 2y ago
  It should be possible to pay for something while still having “best effort under shared resources” as the expected service level. Compare local bus tickets vs taking a cab. The taxi costs 20x more, but in the best case scenario, they provide exactly the same value! If the bus is late, cold or overcrowded, I have no expectations to get refunded or even an apology. I just have to suck it up. This happens rarely enough that I still accept it and hand over my trust to them. There is no illusion that my $2 bus ticket alone is enough to keep the bus running, in contrast with the cab. (Bus companies having a tough time to profit is an orthagonal issue, taxi drivers struggle a lot too)
dspillett 2y ago
> Not entirely managed and worry free. Which is where a lot of the extra cost comes from. Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task. Some of your costs of doing business won't scale down perfectly beyond a certain point so you won't make nearly as much from 1000 2$ customers as you will 100 $20 ones. The same for numerous technical matters. And that is before you think about SLAs and support - you might have realistic views on what to expect for $2 but having worked at the cheap end of web hosting I can assure you that a great many will not, especially at times when things don't go 100% right.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  > Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task. the hope is that some customers will grow and bring more revenue from more expensive plans and services.
arp242 2y ago
What you want for $2/month is unreasonable. I pay more than double for FastMail. As the article explains, it won't even cover the base hardware costs. So you won't be "paying your part". The only reason to offer something like this is to "up-sell" to an actual properly paid plan, and since you will also lose quite a large percentage to payment processor fees, have extra support/admin overhead, deal with users who now feel entitles to "paid support", having a $1 or $2/month price point is just not worth it. You will either need pay for it, or do it yourself on a cheap Linode VPS or Hetzner machine or whatnot.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  I pay myself for Fastmail and think that is a reasonable price. 2$ was a number, 4 or 5 would probably also do. Just something that can some out of the latte budget.
  - drekipus 2y ago
    Do you pay $5 a month for lattes, or $20 a month for lattes?

raverbashing 2y ago

Why do you even need docker for that? Just use systemd and cgroups to manage it.

vasco 2y ago
It's not why do you need it, it's that there's 2000 people that know how to do it with docker for every person that knows how to do it with cgroups. And your question is probably just signaling you're in the second group (I'm in the first).
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Skill issue ig. The ease of portability and I like Swarm a lot.
Modified3019 2y ago
Would be curious about any tutorials you recommend on doing that.
- rascul 2y ago
  Systemd runs things in cgroups by default, so installing the postgres package from your systemd distro's official repos and ensuring that is enabled and running will get you postgres in cgroups to start with. From there you can check the systemd.resource-control(5) man page for some potentially interesting tunables.