
Show HN: PaaS with database and free backups - vincelt
https://backery.io
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JMTQp8lwXL
I love services like this, but I am super weary to adopt them, particularly
after Now v1's deprecation. It's kind of difficult to run a stable production
application when your Platform-as-a-Service provider announced major breaking
changes-- aka killing docker, and forcing me to rewrite my application in
serverless lambdas (which doesn't work for all use cases, like web sockets).

It killed the category in my mind, it isn't even your fault. I now feel far
more comfortable running on bread-and-butter tools, like AWS/GCP/Azure with
Kubernetes. The overhead sucks, but at least I can plan for things better than
I can when hosting with fast-moving PaaS providers.

Hosting is too important of a problem to wholly outsource entirely to a PaaS
platform if it's subject to shuffling at a rate I can't control (exception:
personal projects with no real availability expectations). That's the double
edged sword with platforms like these. They let you get your application
online rapidly, but you could be subject to unforeseen technical debt at the
hosting provider's will. I learned (the hard way) that I'm not a fan on
managing risk under those terms.

~~~
revskill
Not quite. If your application architecture is flexible enough, in this case,
if you could split endpoints into serverless endpoints, i believe you could
combine them later to adapt other providers.

For websocket, you can move it to another "not-serverless" hosting as well.

Splitting then combine is far more easier than combine then splitting.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Yeah, but then you have to ditch Now for your websockets, and you
significantly increase the complexity of your deployment by having your
serverless code on Now and your containers on Kubernetes.

At that point, I'd rather just go fully in on Kubernetes and keep the benefits
of containers, rather than using two cloud providers.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Honestly, there's a time to ask, "could I run this on a single server LAMP
stack?" _If_ it matches what you're doing, it'll work for years-decades with a
little care and feeding. Can be self-hosted, or if you host elsewhere is a
common denominator of service.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
That might require a little bit more security knowledge than I practically
have, with respect to securing servers in cloud environments. That was one of
the appeals of PaaS platforms, to me. At least with Kubernetes, you're based
on things like Container OS, which to my knowledge are secure out of the box
(zero config).

Me, setting that up from scratch on a single VPS, that might get hacked if I
mess it up, and then my customer's availably is compromised? I wouldn't want
to be in that situation.

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vincelt
Hey, I built this over a few weeks. If you have any feedback please let me
know!

~~~
mark_l_watson
Congrats on shipping. Your pricing, very roughly, looks like about 1/2 that of
Heroku.

One question: for the two lower cost plans with weekly backup: if there is a
hardware failure and you need to restart all apps on a new server, how much
time would this take? I am not asking for an estimate if the data center you
use goes down, just asking about an estimate for spinning up apps on a new
server.

I ask because I like to host small experiments. If apps are down occasionally
for a half hour or an hour that is OK, but a few hours isn’t.

~~~
vincelt
Thanks :)

The time to spin a new server and set up the apps back on it is no more than a
few minutes (depending if you had a DB and how large it is). You can see it in
action when you scale an app up, it will spin a new server, import back the DB
on it, build your app and switch DNS to the new location. Rarely takes more
than 5 minutes.

I think tho if something happens at the hardware level and we lose our servers
we would seriously consider switching providers.

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jasonvorhe
Great project!

There's a typo in your docs, first line below "Source Code", it says "maneer"
instead of "manner".

I'm curious how your projects are doing finally. Would you mind sharing? Maybe
even via an open dashboard like Buffer and Ghost are doing?

I hope you're either doing good already or will do soon!

~~~
vincelt
Thanks :) And thanks for the typo.

If you're interested: for now I've only monetized two projects beside Backery
(Nucleus and Harmony). Nucleus is doing right now around $200 / month
(growing) and Harmony around $150 monthly, slowing decreasing with time. I
like building too much but should focus more on selling, even tho it feels a
bit counterintuitive to me. An open dashboard is a good idea, I love these.
Can definitely put one in place once I have some more steady revenues :)

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city41
I think I’m a target audience for something like this. I created a web app
that uses Postgres and hosted it with elastic beanstalk. It was about
$50/month so I took it down. $3/month is much more reasonable for my needs

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ngrilly
Looks like a managed caprover.com :-)

Is there a way to store immutable files (something similar to S3)?

Is the filesystem available and persistent?

Regarding PostgreSQL and other databases, do you backup the WAL? (DigitalOcean
Managed Databases backups the WAL every 5 minutes.)

~~~
vincelt
Ah yeah! I used Caprover when it was still CaptainDuckDuck, it was awesome :)

\- No, for now it's only application hosting. You should use an external
service like S3 to store immutable files.

\- Although filesystem is available it might reset on server upgrade / scaling
/ migration. That happens very rarely (safe for temp files) but general files
should be stored somewhere like S3.

\- For PostgreSQL backups, they are actually done with dumps (pg_dump) so it's
not a base backup.

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Existenceblinks
The lowest price is quite attractive to people who run an app on a $5 VPS
(although there are some < $5 / vps out there). $5 VPS vs $3 PaaS, Kinda good
market positioning!

Would be nice if you support Elixir (you don't have to, maybe it's not worth
it since demand would not be high)

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ksec
Nice, I have always been wondering why Heroku don't work with other
Infrastructure provider on cheaper alternatives at the low to Mid end price
range.

Congrats on launching.

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opscaptain
Another viable alternative is OpsCaptain.
[https://www.opscaptain.com/](https://www.opscaptain.com/)

~~~
aboutruby
> If you want another database such as PostgreSQL, MySQL et al, you must
> deploy them in another container as an addon.

Sounds like a pain.

~~~
opscaptain
They are listed on the dashboard, you point and click, select the version you
want and the database is ready and running. There is no requirement on your
part to handle the installation.

~~~
matt2000
Would you call it a managed database, i.e. does it come with continuous
backups and things like that?

~~~
opscaptain
Nope not managed. Only the Shared MongoDB database is managed. Does not
provide continuous backups although planned only snapshot backups at the
moment. We intend to offer a managed shared offering for the other databases
as well but not a priority as MongoDB was and still is the most requested
database.

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tschellenbach
As soon as someone makes a serverless postgres with a free tier on low usage
we're going to see some big changes in the industry

~~~
vbsteven
What does that mean, a serverless postgres? Per query billing?

~~~
zinclozenge
For me that would mean no limit on number of tables and rows assuming "low"
usage, probably in terms of number of reads+writes over a certain period of
time.

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wysewun
Looks great. Do you Oka on offering US hosting? Looks like it is currently
based in Amaterdam.

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aboutruby
Hi, do you handle something similar to buildpacks and heroku addons? The price
is very attractive. I should get around to try it this week.

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vbsteven
Congrats on launching.

Unfortunately after the parse.com fiasco I have vowed to never again use a
PaaS/BaaS service again for important deployments.

~~~
lucasverra
parse is alive and kicking on OSS [0], we at Universal Voucher are based on a
vendor that deploys quickly the updates

[0] : [https://github.com/parse-community/parse-
server](https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server)

~~~
vbsteven
Yeah, one of my clients ran on OSS Parse for a while too but at the time of
Parse.com shutting down OSS parse was not stable at all.

In the end we decided to rewrite the whole thing as a Java/Spring/Postgres
monolith on Kubernetes. The rewrite took 3 months from decision to production
and has been running fine for two years now. Initially on AWS and more
recently the staging/dev environments have been moved to DigitalOcean in a
couple of hours.

After the pending acquisition we’ll probably move the whole thing to Azure and
I expect that to take a couple of days.

~~~
lucasverra
quick question :

if you are happy on DO, why switch to Azure ?

~~~
vbsteven
We switched our staging/dev environments to DO because of cost. A small
Kubernetes cluster and hosted Postgres does not cost much there and is very
easy to setup. But their hosted Kubernetes and Postgres services are still in
“early access” so I’m holding off running production services on there for
now.

The switch to Azure will likely happen post-acquisition to move everything
into the infrastructure of the buyer.

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Elect2
What's your MongoDB version and is it legal according to their new license?

~~~
vincelt
Currently Mongo version is 3.4.x, I believe it's still within their old
license.

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stevekemp
There's a minor spelling mistake "Ressources" on your page.

~~~
vincelt
Thank you :) fixed

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dvdhnt
This looks great! I’m going to give it a shot.

~~~
vincelt
Thanks! Let me know what you think.

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sergiomattei
Excellent work! Taking a look.

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villgax
Dokku is a FOSS Heroku alternative, like this one

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tnolet
Yes, well no, not really.

It is single host. It requires still managing the host node you run it on.
Dokku is nice and they did a good job mimicking the Heroku tool chain, but it
is not even close to actually providing the value Heroku gives.

