
Ask HN: Is it a good idea to spin up a VPS for each subscriber? - do_spinup
My SaaS is going to be priced at much more than $5&#x2F;mo, but the computation involved is fairly cheap. A $5 VPS from Linode&#x2F;DigitalOcean is more than sufficient. However, latency is fairly important criteria to my application, so a dedicated VPS (as much of an oxymoron that term is) would be pretty neat.<p>Is it feasible to spin up a separate VPS every time I get a subscriber? They&#x27;d be paying much more than $5&#x2F;mo, so the cost of the VPS would be covered.
======
bdwalter
Better get very very good at configuration management, provisioning, patching,
monitoring, and all the other things that go along with running large
quantities of infra (even if virtual). I don't know anything about your app,
but I do know many shops that deeply regret going down this path rather than
building multi-tenant in the first place.

For what its worth, and some may disagree, but production SaaS apps don't
belong on Linode/DigitalOcean... but that's a whole other topic.

~~~
ezekg
What's your reasoning for that last comment? Why don't you think prod apps
should be running on Linode or DO? I have experience with both and really
enjoy using DO. Their infra seems solid, so just curious as to why you made
that comment.

~~~
bdwalter
I have used both extensively and love them for dev and non production
environments.

Perhaps I have some old biases, but I have gotten caught up in noisy neighbor
hell more times than I can count. Being impacted by DDOS attacks on your
neighbors is no fun.

Add in privacy/security compliance where they attempt to leverage their
facilities SOC2 reports rather than operate their own business to this
standard and it just doesn't work for me or my customers.

EDIT: FWIW, my concerns tend to come from a place much further along in the
game that might not be relevant to you right now. If you're still proving your
business model and this is the fastest way to get there then by all means.

------
ezekg
Why not build a proper multi-tenant service? Do you absolutely need the
compute power for each customer? What are you gonna do when 6 months down the
line you need to apply a critical update to all of your servers? What about
deployment? Seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble for yourself, imo.

------
malux85
We are doing this at SignalBox - but recently better containerisation with
Docker has given us much more flexibility, and now we can dedicated host or
multi tenant with very little configuration change, I’d recommend going down
this route

(Some of our customers, e.g. ad tech, fx trading) have very low latency
requirements do being able to dedicated host them has been good

------
le-mark
You should have people willing to pay before you do anything. Having said
that, consider, if a $5 intance can host 100 customers, that's $.05 per
customer. One may ask, how does 100% increase in cost per customer make any
sense?

------
LiamPa
I have thought about this before from a security point of view but the hassle
of setting up and running my multiple databases wasn’t worth it.

I assume you have a database that is shared, would that not become the
bottleneck in latency?

------
tuananh
i think containers would suit you better.

