Why I'd never host my apps on a VPS

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00:00 - Introduction
00:01 - Services for Building a SAS Product
00:12 - Discussion on the Need for Services
00:40 - Cost Analysis of Hosting on Versel
01:35 - Importance of Logging in a Production System
02:24 - Considerations for Setting up Logging
03:40 - Benefits of Using Logging Services
04:39 - Challenges of Hosting Databases on VPS
05:37 - Advantages of Using Database Services
07:28 - Authentication and the Use of Auth Services
09:32 - File Storage and the Importance of Offloading
12:00 - Conclusion

[WebDevCody]

Y'all need to keep in mind that I live in the US where I can easily spend $20 just by buying some milk and two boxes of cereal for my family, so when I say I'd rather use a third party service, these prices do not seem crazy. If you have a real product that makes money, you won't care if you are spending $100 a month on services because those are just operational costs you can write off as losses in taxes. A good engineer will always keep in mind migration paths for if a service becomes too expensive and will NOT allow their application to succumb to vendor lock in.

[etagh]

If you don't live in US then suddenly those prices are a serious cost

[justinwlin]

lmao. YT recommended this to me prob bc of the irony of ur new videos 😂. Keep up the great work tho! 🔥 Resources u make are awesome for people actually in the weeds of it all

[theLowestPointInMyLife]

The decision is easy for me because I have no money, so I have to do everything myself. But I think a lot of the effort for backend stuff is way overstated, pretty simple to set up NGINX, fail2ban, postgres, and then run whatever server framework you want. Guess it depends on your foundation as a coder and what knowledge you have. I think a lot of the more modern devs, from JS/bootcamp path, with no low level foundation, probably lean more towards services.

[roguesherlock]

I think having a good migration path is the key. You start with these services, and have a strategy to migrate in case it becomes too expensive.

[zi_t]

Disregarding the voices of other ppl agreeing/disagreeing with you, I genuinely thank you for making these types of videos. Everything you say are things I wish I learned in school.

[dontwanttousemyrealnametol]

As a Linux enthusiast and a production factory worker, I want to help solve our company's problems by complementing and slowly replacing their ERP software and to roll my own. I'd expect no more than 100 users. Most features of the ERP software are not even used and there are huge discrepancies in stock keeping, resulting in a cascade of problems. At the same time, there is a need to document packaging processes digitally, and to better track orders in different stages of production. I don't want my app to be SaaS, and I want it to work entirely offline.

[mycode]

Building software is always subjective to the situation you are in. For example currently our company works for small budge clients that would really appreciate if the don't have to pay for everything authenticated user etc. Most of these things you uave to nail down only the first time for the next implementation you will not spent more than couple of yours to set up ( talking about general functionality, like emails, authenthication etc)

[irfanMiral]

A great Example to not listen everyone on internet.

[gbrllnz]

You can use something like Dokku or Tsuru to abstract a lot of things that you’d have to manage by yourself using a VPS.

[Jeanpierrec]

So as a saas staring up, I could spend even a week setting up half this stuff in a VPS and then not have to touch it apart from a few updates every now and then, or I now need to generate, at minute 7 in the video, $60 a month for services + $56 dollars an hour to pay myself the engineer who I would be paying anyway.

And yes I am capable of securely setting up the services discussed this far, if you had started off with Auth + payment then there would be an argument.

How many dedicated users would you at this point need a month to just cover your services fees before you even begin making any money yourself?

$100-$150 seems a decent bet to spin up one of your "save yourself an hour" stacks, per month. That's a fair amount of money every month when you are trying to build up a client base for a SaaS which may fail, I mean you could probably buy a fair amount of groceries every month for that amount

[josephajibodu]

He's actually valid. I enjoy devops and tinkering with servers alot, but if I had the budget, I will save my time with third party services.

When you run a business, you'd understand the importance of saving time with good third party service.

[maksymdudyk]

Thank you for the video. I don't have much experience, but I think, that we may start with a VPS, and later, as the project develops, we gradually take infrastructure modules out to cloud solutions - for the sake of security and scaling.

[gnorts_mr_alien]

your point has enormous merit but two things you don't mention: 1) those are recurring expenses so multiply that monthly price by however many months your service will stay active - if service is successful, should not matter much and 2) many of the services are priced in a way that if your project takes off you will have to pay out of the nose or slowly move away

[eshw]

I love the guys on youtube like you, who just drop constant knowledge for us, instead of videos where half of it is a promo for their course, etc 😀😀😀

[nmo]

The negativity in these first few comments perplexes me. I think of literally every purchase I make in terms of how many hours of my life it costs me to purchase vs how many it’ll save me.

I do these exact same comparisons all the time. And, more often than not, the answer is just to pay for it rather than do it myself.

[marble_wraith]

Your math is backwards 🤣 $60 a month and saving an hour of dev time pays for itself on the first 3?

You are assuming the admins / devs working on those parts of the stack will need to more than an hour a month configuring / updating stuff, which i don't think is realistic at all. Provided things are architected correctly and it's built for scale, maybe 30 minutes total a month, and that's assuming automated cron jobs can't handle things for some reason.

I agree the initial setup time for a roll-your-own solution for the first month, would be expensive, but here's the thing. Even if you blow out the initial setup time to 10 hours ($600), that's *still* going to end up being cheaper after 12 months then paying SaaS and PaaS providers.

The correct answer is, neither approach is best. You do a hybrid of both.

Figure out which parts of the app are most difficult to scale / will require automated horizontal scaling. Logging and database automatically fall into this category. But compute? That depends on what kinda thing you're running in prod as to whether you actually need to scale this aspect. CI/CD? Same thing, does this need to be horizontally abstracted to an API / auto scaled? Most of the time no.

[havoq]

Top Video on my feed haha, the YT algorithm is taking the piss

[IvanRandomDude]

Infrastructure/DevOps is hard, don't do it yourself. However, certain software features are fine to implement on your own. For example, there is nothing wrong with simple cookie authentication if that's all you need.

[sohansingh]

I am junior, so I will trying building a lot of abstracted things on my own, instead of relying on 3rd party services