Deployment and infrastructure for a bootstrapped webapp with 150k monthly visits

Great write-up. Note that the author is only serving 70 requests per second at peak with 15 thousand registered users and 3 thousand in revenue per month. This just shows that you don't always have to plan to scale to thousands (or millions) of requests per second.

This blue-green deployment workflow reminds me of a similar setup used by the creator of SongRender[1], which I found about via the running in production podcast[2]. One thing to be aware of with smaller VPS providers like Linode, DO, and Vultr is that they charge per hour rather than per second. So if you boot up a new VM every time you deploy you're charged for a full hour each time.

[1] https://jake.nyc/words/bluegreen-deploys-and-immutable-infrastructure-with-terraform/

[2] https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/83-songrender-lets-you-create-audio-visualizer-videos-from-audio-clips

When you're a 1 man show, you need to both save your own time, and compute costs.

To save your time, use the simplest thing you know how to use. Whatever you can set up easily and gets you serving a hello world on the internet.

To save compute, just don't do stupid things. In particular, you should consider what happens if this project isn't a runaway success. One day, you might want to leave it running in 'maintenance mode' with just a few thousand users. For that, you'd prefer to be running on a $10/month VPS than a $2000/month cloud setup which is going to require constant migrations etc.

Things like automatic failover and loadbalancing are seldom required for 1-man shows - the failure rate of the cloud providers hardware will be much lower than your own failure rate because you screwed up or were unavailable for some reason.

I don't see why the author is so proud of avoiding tooling that would make their build and deploy process simpler? Even something like digitalocean's own buildkit based "apps" would be an upgrade here. Deploying your app using ssh and git is not magic or simple it's just a refusal to learn how actual software delivery is done.

Even totally dodging docker/k8s/nomad/dagger or anything that's even remotely complicated platforms like AWS/DO/Fly.io/Render/Railway/etc obsolete this "simple" approach with nothing but a config file.

I also theorize that the author is likely wasting a boatload of money serving ~0 requests on the staging machine almost all the time, due to him literally switching a floating IP rather than using two distinctly specced machines for production and staging

I'm a strong advocate of boring technology too but I'm also very much in favor of keeping things off my dev machine. In that case they have to run ssh, git and run a script to switch endpoints.

My current boring system for a simple Rails app (https://getbirdfeeder.com) is that I push to GitLab, the CI builds a docker image and does the ssh & docker-compose up -d dance. That way I can deploy / roll back from anywhere even without my computer as long as I can log into GitLab (and maybe even fix things with their web editor). Seems a lot "more boring" to me and having the deploy procedore codified in a .gitlab-ci.yml acts as documentation too.

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