5 ms·

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require. You'd

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require. You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

fragmede 11mo ago
You can get quite far without that box, even, and just use Cloudflare R2 as free static hosting.
- selcuka 11mo ago
  CloudFlare Pages is even easier for static hosting with automatic GitHub pulls.
  - jen729w 11mo ago
    Happy Netlify customer here, same deal. $0. (LOL 'customer'. But the point is, when the day comes, I'll be happy to give them money.)
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 11mo ago
      Careful what you wish for. Netlify sent a guy a $104k bill from the free plan. Thankfully social media outage saved the guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776
      - ascorbic 11mo ago
        Netlify changed their pricing after that so that free accounts are always free.
        franciscop 11mo ago
        Could you give a reference please? I was literally going to recommend Netlify at work, but didn't after I saw that story.
        selcuka 11mo ago
        https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#faq https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#faq > The free plan is always free, with hard monthly limits that cannot be exceeded or incur any costs.
        immibis 11mo ago
        Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them? I guess not if your business is making more than that - bandwidth expense for a shopping site shouldn't be a problem when the customers are spending $100 for every 0.1GB - but that price should realistically be closer to $0.01/GB or even $0.002/GB. Sounds like they're forwarding you AWS's extremely excessive bandwidth pricing.
        selcuka 11mo ago
        > Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them? Where did you read that? The pricing page says 10 credits per GB, and extra credits can be purchased at $10 per 1500 credit. So it's more like $0.067/GB.
    - fvdessen 11mo ago
      FYI I just migrated from Netlify to Cloudflare pages and Cloudflare is massively faster across all metrics.
koito17 11mo ago
On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages issuing up to 8 database queries, I haven't seen responses take more than about 4 - 5 ms to generate. Since I have 16 GB of RAM to spare, I just let SQLite mmap the whole the database and store temp tables in RAM. I can further optimize the backend by e.g. replacing Tera with Askama and optimizing the SQL queries, but the easiest win for latency is to just run the binary in a VPS close to my users. However, the current setup works so well that I just see no point to changing what little "infrastructure" I've built. The other cool thing is the fact that the backend + litestream uses at most ~64 MB of RAM. Plenty of compute and RAM to spare. It's also neat being able to allocate a few cores on the same machine to run self-hosted GitHub actions, so you can have the same machine doing CI checks, rebuilding the binary, and restarting the service. Turns out the base model M4 is really fast at compiling code compared to just about every single cloud computer I've ever used at previous jobs.
- busterarm 11mo ago
  Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?
  - n3t 11mo ago
    What's your cloud bill?
  - wheybags 11mo ago
    https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos-m/?sku=ST28000NM003K https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos...
    - selcuka 11mo ago
      > one of the couple dozen databases I guess this is one of those use cases that justify the cloud. It's hard to host that reliably at home.
bambax 11mo ago
Exactly! I've been self hosting for about two years now, on a NAS with Cloudflare in front of it. I need the NAS anyway, and Cloudflare is free, so the marginal cost is zero. (And even if the CDN weren't free it probably wouldn't cost much.) I had two projects reach the front page of HN last year, everything worked like a charm. It's unlikely I'll ever go back to professional hosting, "cloud" or not.
- John23832 11mo ago
  If you have explosive growth, sure cloud. The vast majority of us that are actually technically capable are better served self hosting. Especially with tools like cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale.

fragmede 11mo ago

You can get quite far without that box, even, and just use Cloudflare R2 as free static hosting.

selcuka 11mo ago
CloudFlare Pages is even easier for static hosting with automatic GitHub pulls.
- jen729w 11mo ago
  Happy Netlify customer here, same deal. $0. (LOL 'customer'. But the point is, when the day comes, I'll be happy to give them money.)
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 11mo ago
    Careful what you wish for. Netlify sent a guy a $104k bill from the free plan. Thankfully social media outage saved the guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776
    - ascorbic 11mo ago
      Netlify changed their pricing after that so that free accounts are always free.
      - franciscop 11mo ago
        Could you give a reference please? I was literally going to recommend Netlify at work, but didn't after I saw that story.
        selcuka 11mo ago
        https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#faq https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#faq > The free plan is always free, with hard monthly limits that cannot be exceeded or incur any costs.
        immibis 11mo ago
        Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them? I guess not if your business is making more than that - bandwidth expense for a shopping site shouldn't be a problem when the customers are spending $100 for every 0.1GB - but that price should realistically be closer to $0.01/GB or even $0.002/GB. Sounds like they're forwarding you AWS's extremely excessive bandwidth pricing.
        selcuka 11mo ago
        > Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them? Where did you read that? The pricing page says 10 credits per GB, and extra credits can be purchased at $10 per 1500 credit. So it's more like $0.067/GB.
  - fvdessen 11mo ago
    FYI I just migrated from Netlify to Cloudflare pages and Cloudflare is massively faster across all metrics.

koito17 11mo ago

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages issuing up to 8 database queries, I haven't seen responses take more than about 4 - 5 ms to generate. Since I have 16 GB of RAM to spare, I just let SQLite mmap the whole the database and store temp tables in RAM. I can further optimize the backend by e.g. replacing Tera with Askama and optimizing the SQL queries, but the easiest win for latency is to just run the binary in a VPS close to my users. However, the current setup works so well that I just see no point to changing what little "infrastructure" I've built. The other cool thing is the fact that the backend + litestream uses at most ~64 MB of RAM. Plenty of compute and RAM to spare. It's also neat being able to allocate a few cores on the same machine to run self-hosted GitHub actions, so you can have the same machine doing CI checks, rebuilding the binary, and restarting the service. Turns out the base model M4 is really fast at compiling code compared to just about every single cloud computer I've ever used at previous jobs.

busterarm 11mo ago
Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?
- n3t 11mo ago
  What's your cloud bill?
- wheybags 11mo ago
  https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos-m/?sku=ST28000NM003K https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos...
  - selcuka 11mo ago
    > one of the couple dozen databases I guess this is one of those use cases that justify the cloud. It's hard to host that reliably at home.

bambax 11mo ago

Exactly! I've been self hosting for about two years now, on a NAS with Cloudflare in front of it. I need the NAS anyway, and Cloudflare is free, so the marginal cost is zero. (And even if the CDN weren't free it probably wouldn't cost much.) I had two projects reach the front page of HN last year, everything worked like a charm. It's unlikely I'll ever go back to professional hosting, "cloud" or not.

John23832 11mo ago
If you have explosive growth, sure cloud. The vast majority of us that are actually technically capable are better served self hosting. Especially with tools like cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale.