I'm always curious what folks use for their database for things like this. Even though I like SQLite--a lot--my preference has become that the app is generally separate and mostly stateless. Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.
Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed using neon.tech more than I expected (esp. the GUI and branching). I guess the thing that has crept in: speed/ease is really beating out my ingrained cheapness as I've gotten older and have less time. A SaaS DB has sped things up. Still don't like the monthly bills & variability though.
>Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.
Have you used SQLite with Litestream? That's the beauty of it. You can blow away the app and deploy it somewhere else, and Litestream will just pull down your data and continue along as if nothing happened.
At the top of this post, I show a demo of attaching Litestream to my app, and then blowing away my Heroku instance and redeploying a clean instance on Fly.io, and Litestream ports all the data along with the new deployment:
I'm currently using SQLite + Litestream with one app, though it's strictly Litestream as a backup/safety net and I'd be manually standing the thing back up if it came to building the server anew, as that's not automated.
If anything, I'd probably end up looking at a dedicated PG VPS. I've started to get used to a few Postgres conveniences over SQLite, especially around datetimes, various extensions, and more sophisticated table alterations (without that infamous SQLite 12-step process), etc. So that's been an evolution, too, compared to my always-SQLite days.
It's trivial to run mysql (or Perforce variant) or Postgres, with some minor caching for simple apps.
I'm not sure what you are hitting that would go past the capacity of a small vps.
Independent VPs for DB make sense, but if the requests are reasonably cached, you can get away with it (and beef up the backups) especially if it's something non-critical.
Definitely considering a dedicated Postgres VPS. I've not looked yet, but I'd like to locate a decent cookbook around this. I've installed Postgres on a server before for playing around, and it was easy enough. But there are a lot of settings, considerations around access and backups and updates, etc. I suspect these things aren't overly thorny, but some of the guides/docs can make it feel that way. We'll see, as it's an area of interest, for sure.
I tested the app and found it awesome that it doesn't require account creation! You just get a private link, share it with the group, and when they open the link, it asks who they are to 'log in' as themselves. Of course, users could game the system by logging in as other members, but I think it's a compromise the developer made, knowing the user base and how frictionless it makes the user experience. Neat.
I've used this really neat website called when2meet[0] for community organizing heavily. You make an event, get a url and share it. Users choose their name and they can even add a completely optional password to prevent impersonation
I'm heavily inspired by it and working on an app for book clubs to host "elections" to choose their next book to read using a variety of voting systems (ranked choice, approval, scored, first past the post, etc).
Re your question on saving costs: If you run it on a single Linux VPS, then I suspect you can get the costs down to 5-10$ per month.
One thing I find interesting is the growth chart: It's linear. But given that the app clearly has some traction, and is viral in nature, how come it isn't exponential?
The pay only what you use model is nice when your revenue also scales with use. For my projects I wish there were plans with higher fixed cost and risk only in availability and not in cost.
The only downside with that I've found is people and orgs tend to overestimate their future usage of X across the board, so profits rarely match expectations with pay-as-you-go, and tier-based pricing will easily overcome you by capturing more $$ from the market. Some notable exceptions are things like file storage where people tend to underestimate what they will need I find.
I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really affect them or they're happy for it to pay for the convenience (my assumption).
6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something).
Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.
So many people don't seem to understand how efficient modern machines are.
As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)...
I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data.
I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is making in pure profit. If you're already a software dev... you can absolutely manage the complexity of hosting things yourself for FAR cheaper. You won't get five 9s of reliability (not that you're getting that from any major cloud vendor anyways without paying through the nose and a real SLA) but a small UPS will easily get you to 99% uptime - which is absolutely fine for something like this.
As DHH said somewhere, it's incredible that the modern cloud stack has managed to get PROGRAMMERS to be scared of COMPUTERS. Seriously, what's with that? That shouldn't even be possible?
If you can understand programming, you can understand Linux. Might take a while to be really confident, but do you need incredible confidence when you have backups? :)
The problem is that my coworkers are morons who seem incapable of remembering to run a simple `explain analyze` on their queries. They'd rather just write monstrosities that kindasorta work without giving a single damn about performance.
It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.
> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.
And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.
At my last job, we had architects pushing to make everything into microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability (and understanding and maintainability and operations and ability for developers to actually run/test the code). The database can't do anything to help you when you split your queries onto different db instances on different VMs for no reason.
I heard we had a 7 figure annual compute spend, and IIRC we only had a few hundred requests per second peak plus some batch jobs for a few million accounts. A single $160 N100 minipc could probably handle the workload with better reliability than we had if we hadn't gone down that particular road to insanity.
> ... microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability
Heh, remind me of a discussion I had with a coworker roughly 6 month ago. I tried to explain to them that the ability to scale each microservices separately almost never improves the actual performance of the platform as a whole - after all, you still need to have network calls between each service and could've also just started the monolith twice.
And that would've most likely even needed less RAM too, even if each instance will likely consume more - after all, you now need less applications running to serve the same request.
This discussion took place in the context of a b2e saas platform with very moderate usage, almost everything being plain CRUD. Like 10-15k simultaneous users making data entries etc.
I'm always unsure how I should feel after such discussions. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure he probably thinks that I'm dumb for not getting microservices. On the other hand... Well... ( ꈍ ᴗ ꈍ )
My understanding is that DO VPS’ are underpowered (as are VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far more powerful.
That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice.
On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a convenience factor comparable to OVH, etc)?
Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to their quality.
Uh, actually at a quick glance, seems the U.s. sites are more for their cloud offering and maybe not bare metal servers.....i think (sadly): https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
You're right but I'll play devil's advocate for teaching purposes:
* Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is released and all your users are pulling new config data.
* Your application data may be very important to your users and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.
* You're users may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.
* Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for another user.
Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.
All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure and complexity in order to have more success with their projects.
* that's just static files. Even a $4 droplets will hardly ever get into issues serving that, even with hundreds of simultaneous requests.
* Okay, I guess that means we should use 2? So that's $8 now.
* Vercel really doesn't help you there beyond serving static files from cdn. That hardly matters at this scale, you should keep in mind that you "only" add about 100ms of latency by serving from the other side of the globe. While that has an impact, it's not really that much. And you can always use another cdn too. They're very often free for html/js/css
* Burst traffic is an issue, especially trolls that just randomly DOS your public servers for shits and giggles. That's pretty much the only one vercel actually helps you against. But so would others, they're not the only ones providing that service, and most do it for free.
Frankly, the only real and valid reason is the previously mentioned: they've likely got the money and don't mind spending it for the ecosystem. And if they like it... Who are we to interfere? Aside from pointing out how massively they're overpaying, but they've gotta be able to handle that if they're willing to publish an article like this
> Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet?
How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7 requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that couldn't handle that.
In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the database) in a text file on disk without any performance issues whatsoever.
My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching.
I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.
I didn't mean it quite so insultingly, but yes, even a very modest server would handle that kind of load easily. You're not particularly high throughput (a few requests per second?) and I imagine the database is fairly efficient (you're not storing pages of text or binary blobs). I think you'd be pleasently surprised by what a little VPS can do.
I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3% on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with a small VPS without any trouble at all.
You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:
This is cool, dude. Thank you for sharing. Irrespective of the actual numbers I’m always curious how people fund projects like this.
One thing I’ve been interested in is the idea of decentralized handling for this. That is, the project is funded in and every month if its bills don’t get paid it dies. If it receives enough to go over it buys T-bonds for the appropriate duration and then burns them down over time.
Perhaps in the past it would have to be automated but I wonder if in the near future a limited AI agent could be the server and you leave him alone to do his thing.
To clarify some confusion in this thread, it might be helpful to distinguish "open source" (the application) from "free" (this hosted instance of the application). Munging the two together might lead to some incorrect conclusions. Running a "free" application for others is going to have certain costs. The cost of running an "open source" application is going to depend entirely on the resources that application consumes, which, if run privately, might be a lot less.
Do I read something wrong, or does the stats amount to ~400 daily visitors with ~2500 page views per day? That's about ~1.7 requests per minute... And they pay $115/month for this?
I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar, but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?
I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app.
A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.
> I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app.
I'm not sure, I'm also "new generation of devs" I suppose, cloud had just entered the beginning of the hype cycle when I started out professionally. Most companies/individuals at that point were pushing for "everything cloud" but after experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look around for alternatives.
I feel like that's just trying to have a "engineering mindset" rather than what generation you belong to.
> ...after experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look around for alternatives...
One would think that to be the common sense case...but, in corporate America - at least the last handful of companies that i worked at - some companies are *only now just getting work loads up to the cloud now*...so they have not yet felt the cost pain....Or, in other cases, other firms are living in the cloud, have seen the exorbitant costs, but move waaaaay toooo sloooow to migrate workloads off cloud (or hybridize them in smart ways for their business)....Or, in even other cases that i have seen, instead of properly analyzing function and costs of cloud usage - and truly applying an engineering mindset to matters - some of these so called IT leaders (who are too busy with powerpoint slides) will simply layoff people and "achieve savings" that way.
Welcome to being a technologist employed at one of several/many American corporations in 2024!
Certainly, I just mean that we are hitting a point where there can be professional devs, with multiple years of experience at tech companies successfully building software, who have only ever known and worked with a PaaS to deploy an app.
It's frustrating too because deployment technologies and tools continue to get better and better. It's never been easier to deploy an application + database to some arbitrary computer. You can do it declaratively, no SSH, no random shell scripts, no suspicious fiddling.
Also, sidenote: but for small stuff you can just deploy in your home. I've done it before. It's really not that scary, and odds are you have a computer laying around. The only "spooky" part is relying on my ISP router. I don't trust that thing, but that can be fixed.
> new generation of devs being raised in the cloud
I unfortunately sorta put myself in this category where my PaaS of choice is Firebase. For this cost-splitting app however, what would you personally recommend if not Vercel? Would you recommend something like a Digital Ocean Droplet or something else? What are the best alternatives in your opinion?
Yes, I believe a Droplet or VPS (virtual private server) from some other provider would be sufficient. Digital Ocean isn't the cheapest, but it's pretty frictionless, slick, and has a lot of good tutorial articles about setting up servers.
You'd have a Linux machine (the VPS) that would have at least 3 programs running:
- Node.js
- the database (likely MySQL or PostgreSQL)
- Nginx or Apache
You'd set up a DNS record pointing your domain at the VPS's IP address. When someone visits your website, their HTTP requests will be routed to port 80 or 443 on the VPS. Nginx will be listening on those ports, and forward (aka proxy) the requests to Node, which will respond back to Nginx, which will then send the response back to the user.
There are of course security and availability concerns that are now your responsibility to handle and configure correctly in order to reach the same level of security and availability provided by a good PaaS. That's what you're paying the PaaS for. However, it is not too difficult to reach a level of security and availability that is more than sufficient for a small, free web app such as this one.
Or they're optimizing for not being a sysadmin, which some people can't do and even some of the people who can find to be very ungratifying work. For a project that runs on this person's enthusiasm, that seems not crazy.
It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3 bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test that all once a month, etc... but if I had to write out a list of things that I enjoy doing and a list of things that I don't, that work would feature heavily on the "yeah, but no" list.
Yes, if you don't want to do that work and are happy to pay someone else to take care of it, then that is great. But if you like making free web apps, relying on a PaaS will get expensive.
> The merchants of complexity thrive when they can scare you into believing that even the simplest things are too dangerous to even attempt by yourself these days.
Awesome first sentence! I know I'm going to agree with the article just by that. This applies to so many things in life, too. We're been taught that so many things people routinely did in the past are now scary and impossible.
That can backfire and give an employer the idea you want to do that work though. I not only hate it, but nobody gives a damn until stuff breaks and then everyone is mad. You rarely get rewarded for stuff silently sitting there and working.
edit: to be clear, I think doing it yourself once is great experience. And I've run small web apps on a single server, all the way from supervisord -> nginx -> passenger -> rails with pg and redis. I'd rather build features or work on marketing.
Definitely don't need a last gen. Someone else did the math upthread and came to one request every 20 seconds, which if you factor in burstiness and that if you have a particularly bad burst that slows down the system a little, the next request will take even longer etc. (ask me how I learned that lesson), it's probably good to budget for it handling multiple requests per second. For this application, my understanding is you've got a handful of people in your group that you're splitting a couple of expenses with, so data processing is small beans and that'll definitely run on a first gen Pi if you optimise it properly, or perhaps a 2nd-3rd gen if you don't want to spend the time
Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!
> A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community.
And this is why open source will finally die, because being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.
A better way to "give back to the community", instead of making open source software, would be to purchase software from other indie developers.
> People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!
We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).
> being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.
edit: remved anecdote
The cost of living will never rise so much that the upper 50% can't easily make enough money. (Otherwise what? The other 150 million people go homeless?)
And unless our industry sees a major shift, which I don't see happening, software engineers will continue being comfortably in the upper 50%.
> We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).
That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.
When I write open source libraries I consider the ones benefitting to be the general public.
Even if my libraries were used only by mega corporations (which they aren't) there would still be a benefit to the public: If companies have lower cost, they will charge lower prices, benefitting customers / the general public. (And yes, they will lower prices. Most markets are not monopolies.)
Open source never benefits the general public, because open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public.
Instead, open source mainly benefits other developers. But at the end of the chain there has to be a product that is of use for non-developers. Because developing isn't for developments sake. And the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made.
If FOSS people made complete products which were end user friendly, I'd buy the argument of benefitting the general public.
> the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made
Which means that they can offer their product for a lower price, which then benefits the general public.
Companies being able to operate cheaper / more efficiently does benefit the general public, as long as the market isn't a monopoly. And as per my above comment, most markets are not monopolies.
> open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public
I've been using Audacity, Gimp, Inkscape, uBlock Origin, and many others long before I knew what FOSS means.
I haven't published any software at all recently. But if I did (anything non-trivial), it would be AGPL. Or even SSPL.
Permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Unlicense, public domain, etc) is a scam to make you work for companies for free - if your software is worth anything to them, that is. They told developers they should use MIT licenses so more people would use their software. That's true. They didn't ask whether that was a good thing.
"Open source will finally die" said on a website likely running on some linux-based server, with some JS frontend, some open source/commercially licensed DB, and communicating with protocols regulated by a non-profit organization. Also in the future maybe reading this page from a device using a RISC-V processor.
Sure.
I hope it brings a tear of joy to the corner of the eyes of those selfless FOSS programmers that they've done their share to help Y Combinator be worth $600 000 000 000. That money is surely better spent on people who deserve it better.
To be fair they're not heavily soliciting donations, and even actively say that they don't need them. So it's not surprising people don't prioritise giving anything. Many users probably haven't even thought of it
Are you the guy with the https://osspledge.com/ billboards around San Francisco? Haha. They’re funny. I enjoyed the art. If it’s actually you, I’d be curious who the illustrator is or if you used generative AI.
I'm not that guy, I'm against open source and free loading. Why would multi million dollar CEOs give anything to FOSS programmers when they're developing their crucial infrastructure for free?
Work for free for huge companies so they can make billion dollar profits while at the same time demanding unionization. Refusing to sell your work to consumers who are willing to pay, yet happy to provide free tech support to free loaders who wouldn't give you a cent. What's the logic?
Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our excess production with the world.
Like any other good work, it does not require acknowledgement or reciprocation, and the benefits are not part of a zero-sum economy where the giver is harmed by any action of the receiver.
You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS. Why does it offend you so much that other people prioritize forms of compensation differently than you do?
That's true, I'm the chief anti-OSS crusader on HN and online. I'll give it a rest after this thread, to breathe and give all a chance to recover strength.
> Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our excess production with the world.
Selling those things is still sharing with the world. Most paid software is cheap to purchase.
If FOSS was an eco system where end users had the common(?) courtesy to donate just a little bit to at least one of the projects they use, then I'd have nothing to say. But whenever I use any FOSS code and donate, I usually find myself alone with two or three other people who have donated.
Unlike most other professions, programming is something most people start with as a hobby in young years. So maybe they don't value their own hard work and effort, even though they've matured past the young hobbyist phase? And then they get misguided by open source activists to labour for free.
A young artist who publishes their songs online for free in the hopes of becoming famous, will still retain copyright on those works. No record label can come around and start selling those songs without even letting the artist know. Much less stealing and selling the songs of a well-established artist if he/she decides to release music for free.
I just don't like free loading, and I don't like enablers either.
I've been going down the VPS rabbit hole lately since I have some toy projects I want to host and really don't like the unpredictable pricing model of these "pay as you go" providers like Vercel. E.g. I really love Supabase but it's hard to justify jumping straight to the $25/month plan in combination with Vercel costs.
I was surprised how extremely easy it is to get set up with Coolify on a Hetzner VPS, which has preset install options for NextJS + Supabase + Posthog + many others. And I get the standard autodeploy on commit functionality. The open-source versions are missing some features, and I don't get the slick Vercel admin interface, but for a pet project it works great. I'm also by no means a sysadmin expert, but with ChatGPT it's pretty easy to figure things out now.
My i5-6600k at home can handle ~15k requests per second for a toy social media app with postgresql assembling the xml to send to the client (though I've done some batching optimization and used rust for my application server to hit that). Passmark cpubenchmark suggests a 13900 should be 6-8x more capable than that.
So it should be able to handle somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000,000x the required load, or maybe 100,000x without the application level optimization.
(TLS reduces this by a factor of ~10 if you're doing handshakes each time. Despite what blogs claim, as far as I can tell, if your CPU doesn't have QAT, TLS is very expensive)
If you're on Hetzner you can get a load balancer with TLS termination for $5/month. It's hidden in the cloud category but fully supports dedicated servers.
Of course doing SSL on the server itself is more secure, but if that's a performance bottleneck the load balancer can be a cost effective compromise
Yes Cloudflare and all of that but they’ll do it for free.
Then you get to determine gains you may get from caching and other potential optimizations from one of the best eyeball connected providers in the world. Oh plus the ability to fend off the largest DDoS attacks ever seen.
Cloudflare tunnels enable you to do all of this through an encrypted tunnel without exposing the machine/services to the internet at all. Cloudflare will still MITM all traffic but so does Hetzner (obviously). At least with the tunnel the connection is persistent so you don’t incur TLS handshaking, etc CPU overhead with each client connection.
Bonus points - you can move hosting providers without any hassle, configure hosting provider redundancy (Hetzner + whoever), all of that stuff.
I'll email this to you, but you could save a ton of money using a serverless database solution like Supabase or NeonDB.
I'm always curious what folks use for their database for things like this. Even though I like SQLite--a lot--my preference has become that the app is generally separate and mostly stateless. Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.
Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed using neon.tech more than I expected (esp. the GUI and branching). I guess the thing that has crept in: speed/ease is really beating out my ingrained cheapness as I've gotten older and have less time. A SaaS DB has sped things up. Still don't like the monthly bills & variability though.
>Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.
Have you used SQLite with Litestream? That's the beauty of it. You can blow away the app and deploy it somewhere else, and Litestream will just pull down your data and continue along as if nothing happened.
At the top of this post, I show a demo of attaching Litestream to my app, and then blowing away my Heroku instance and redeploying a clean instance on Fly.io, and Litestream ports all the data along with the new deployment:
https://mtlynch.io/litestream/
I'm currently using SQLite + Litestream with one app, though it's strictly Litestream as a backup/safety net and I'd be manually standing the thing back up if it came to building the server anew, as that's not automated.
If anything, I'd probably end up looking at a dedicated PG VPS. I've started to get used to a few Postgres conveniences over SQLite, especially around datetimes, various extensions, and more sophisticated table alterations (without that infamous SQLite 12-step process), etc. So that's been an evolution, too, compared to my always-SQLite days.
It's trivial to run mysql (or Perforce variant) or Postgres, with some minor caching for simple apps.
I'm not sure what you are hitting that would go past the capacity of a small vps.
Independent VPs for DB make sense, but if the requests are reasonably cached, you can get away with it (and beef up the backups) especially if it's something non-critical.
Definitely considering a dedicated Postgres VPS. I've not looked yet, but I'd like to locate a decent cookbook around this. I've installed Postgres on a server before for playing around, and it was easy enough. But there are a lot of settings, considerations around access and backups and updates, etc. I suspect these things aren't overly thorny, but some of the guides/docs can make it feel that way. We'll see, as it's an area of interest, for sure.
I tested the app and found it awesome that it doesn't require account creation! You just get a private link, share it with the group, and when they open the link, it asks who they are to 'log in' as themselves. Of course, users could game the system by logging in as other members, but I think it's a compromise the developer made, knowing the user base and how frictionless it makes the user experience. Neat.
I've used this really neat website called when2meet[0] for community organizing heavily. You make an event, get a url and share it. Users choose their name and they can even add a completely optional password to prevent impersonation
I'm heavily inspired by it and working on an app for book clubs to host "elections" to choose their next book to read using a variety of voting systems (ranked choice, approval, scored, first past the post, etc).
[0] https://www.when2meet.com/
Re your question on saving costs: If you run it on a single Linux VPS, then I suspect you can get the costs down to 5-10$ per month.
One thing I find interesting is the growth chart: It's linear. But given that the app clearly has some traction, and is viral in nature, how come it isn't exponential?
The pay only what you use model is nice when your revenue also scales with use. For my projects I wish there were plans with higher fixed cost and risk only in availability and not in cost.
The only downside with that I've found is people and orgs tend to overestimate their future usage of X across the board, so profits rarely match expectations with pay-as-you-go, and tier-based pricing will easily overcome you by capturing more $$ from the market. Some notable exceptions are things like file storage where people tend to underestimate what they will need I find.
I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really affect them or they're happy for it to pay for the convenience (my assumption).
Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;)
The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.
6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something).
Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.
So many people don't seem to understand how efficient modern machines are.
As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)...
I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data.
I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is making in pure profit. If you're already a software dev... you can absolutely manage the complexity of hosting things yourself for FAR cheaper. You won't get five 9s of reliability (not that you're getting that from any major cloud vendor anyways without paying through the nose and a real SLA) but a small UPS will easily get you to 99% uptime - which is absolutely fine for something like this.
As DHH said somewhere, it's incredible that the modern cloud stack has managed to get PROGRAMMERS to be scared of COMPUTERS. Seriously, what's with that? That shouldn't even be possible?
If you can understand programming, you can understand Linux. Might take a while to be really confident, but do you need incredible confidence when you have backups? :)
Not just somewhere, but in Rails World 2024 Opening keynote, and it was absolutely hilarious!
Especially with that meme he showed about vercel is laws +500% markup lmaoo
Don't be afraid of computers, don't be the pink elephant!
The problem is that my coworkers are morons who seem incapable of remembering to run a simple `explain analyze` on their queries. They'd rather just write monstrosities that kindasorta work without giving a single damn about performance.
It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.
> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.
"Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away."
Computers keep getting faster (personified as Andy Grove, from Intel), and software keeps getting slower (Bill Gates, from Microsoft).
> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.
And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.
At my last job, we had architects pushing to make everything into microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability (and understanding and maintainability and operations and ability for developers to actually run/test the code). The database can't do anything to help you when you split your queries onto different db instances on different VMs for no reason.
I heard we had a 7 figure annual compute spend, and IIRC we only had a few hundred requests per second peak plus some batch jobs for a few million accounts. A single $160 N100 minipc could probably handle the workload with better reliability than we had if we hadn't gone down that particular road to insanity.
> ... microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability
Heh, remind me of a discussion I had with a coworker roughly 6 month ago. I tried to explain to them that the ability to scale each microservices separately almost never improves the actual performance of the platform as a whole - after all, you still need to have network calls between each service and could've also just started the monolith twice. And that would've most likely even needed less RAM too, even if each instance will likely consume more - after all, you now need less applications running to serve the same request.
This discussion took place in the context of a b2e saas platform with very moderate usage, almost everything being plain CRUD. Like 10-15k simultaneous users making data entries etc.
I'm always unsure how I should feel after such discussions. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure he probably thinks that I'm dumb for not getting microservices. On the other hand... Well... ( ꈍ ᴗ ꈍ )
My understanding is that DO VPS’ are underpowered (as are VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far more powerful.
That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice.
On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a convenience factor comparable to OVH, etc)?
> good US-based bare metal providers
The times I've needed it, DataPacket (not based in US, but has servers in the US) and Vultr (based in the US) have both been good to me.
In a trademark travesty, I must ask DataPacket.com or DataPacket.net?
Thank you so much. I’ll take a look at these.
Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to their quality.
That’s news thank you. I’ll check this out.
Uh, actually at a quick glance, seems the U.s. sites are more for their cloud offering and maybe not bare metal servers.....i think (sadly): https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
You're right but I'll play devil's advocate for teaching purposes:
* Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is released and all your users are pulling new config data.
* Your application data may be very important to your users and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.
* You're users may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.
* Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for another user.
Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.
All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure and complexity in order to have more success with their projects.
* that's just static files. Even a $4 droplets will hardly ever get into issues serving that, even with hundreds of simultaneous requests.
* Okay, I guess that means we should use 2? So that's $8 now.
* Vercel really doesn't help you there beyond serving static files from cdn. That hardly matters at this scale, you should keep in mind that you "only" add about 100ms of latency by serving from the other side of the globe. While that has an impact, it's not really that much. And you can always use another cdn too. They're very often free for html/js/css
* Burst traffic is an issue, especially trolls that just randomly DOS your public servers for shits and giggles. That's pretty much the only one vercel actually helps you against. But so would others, they're not the only ones providing that service, and most do it for free.
Frankly, the only real and valid reason is the previously mentioned: they've likely got the money and don't mind spending it for the ecosystem. And if they like it... Who are we to interfere? Aside from pointing out how massively they're overpaying, but they've gotta be able to handle that if they're willing to publish an article like this
> Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet?
How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7 requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that couldn't handle that.
In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the database) in a text file on disk without any performance issues whatsoever.
My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching.
I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.
I didn't mean it quite so insultingly, but yes, even a very modest server would handle that kind of load easily. You're not particularly high throughput (a few requests per second?) and I imagine the database is fairly efficient (you're not storing pages of text or binary blobs). I think you'd be pleasently surprised by what a little VPS can do.
I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3% on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with a small VPS without any trouble at all.
You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:
https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
It’s surprising that you ask for advice on this topic in your blog, but then are very dismissive (complete with sarcastic wink) to the advice?
You could run it on Cloudflare workers for free with plenty to spare. You get 5M reads/100k writes per day on D1.
OTOH If you want managed Postgres it seems like you always have to pay a fairy high minimum.
Running the 800th most popular website in the world (25-50M pageviews per day) on a 1GB VPS (Spring Boot, MariaDB, Redis)
Very possible.
https://f5bot.com/ was free for like 8 years and it processed hundreds of thousands of db records a day, and it barely cost anything.
What they need is a payment provider integration so you can ACH or credit card pay immediately. That can also be a monetisation option for them.
You just invented money laundering
This is cool, dude. Thank you for sharing. Irrespective of the actual numbers I’m always curious how people fund projects like this.
One thing I’ve been interested in is the idea of decentralized handling for this. That is, the project is funded in and every month if its bills don’t get paid it dies. If it receives enough to go over it buys T-bonds for the appropriate duration and then burns them down over time.
Perhaps in the past it would have to be automated but I wonder if in the near future a limited AI agent could be the server and you leave him alone to do his thing.
Would be interesting to see how this compares to https://splid.app/
Well this is opensource for one.
Not to be "that guy" but...
To clarify some confusion in this thread, it might be helpful to distinguish "open source" (the application) from "free" (this hosted instance of the application). Munging the two together might lead to some incorrect conclusions. Running a "free" application for others is going to have certain costs. The cost of running an "open source" application is going to depend entirely on the resources that application consumes, which, if run privately, might be a lot less.
Do I read something wrong, or does the stats amount to ~400 daily visitors with ~2500 page views per day? That's about ~1.7 requests per minute... And they pay $115/month for this?
I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar, but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?
I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app.
A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.
> I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app.
I'm not sure, I'm also "new generation of devs" I suppose, cloud had just entered the beginning of the hype cycle when I started out professionally. Most companies/individuals at that point were pushing for "everything cloud" but after experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look around for alternatives.
I feel like that's just trying to have a "engineering mindset" rather than what generation you belong to.
> ...after experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look around for alternatives...
One would think that to be the common sense case...but, in corporate America - at least the last handful of companies that i worked at - some companies are *only now just getting work loads up to the cloud now*...so they have not yet felt the cost pain....Or, in other cases, other firms are living in the cloud, have seen the exorbitant costs, but move waaaaay toooo sloooow to migrate workloads off cloud (or hybridize them in smart ways for their business)....Or, in even other cases that i have seen, instead of properly analyzing function and costs of cloud usage - and truly applying an engineering mindset to matters - some of these so called IT leaders (who are too busy with powerpoint slides) will simply layoff people and "achieve savings" that way.
Welcome to being a technologist employed at one of several/many American corporations in 2024!
Certainly, I just mean that we are hitting a point where there can be professional devs, with multiple years of experience at tech companies successfully building software, who have only ever known and worked with a PaaS to deploy an app.
It's frustrating too because deployment technologies and tools continue to get better and better. It's never been easier to deploy an application + database to some arbitrary computer. You can do it declaratively, no SSH, no random shell scripts, no suspicious fiddling.
Also, sidenote: but for small stuff you can just deploy in your home. I've done it before. It's really not that scary, and odds are you have a computer laying around. The only "spooky" part is relying on my ISP router. I don't trust that thing, but that can be fixed.
> new generation of devs being raised in the cloud
I unfortunately sorta put myself in this category where my PaaS of choice is Firebase. For this cost-splitting app however, what would you personally recommend if not Vercel? Would you recommend something like a Digital Ocean Droplet or something else? What are the best alternatives in your opinion?
Yes, I believe a Droplet or VPS (virtual private server) from some other provider would be sufficient. Digital Ocean isn't the cheapest, but it's pretty frictionless, slick, and has a lot of good tutorial articles about setting up servers.
You'd have a Linux machine (the VPS) that would have at least 3 programs running:
- Node.js
- the database (likely MySQL or PostgreSQL)
- Nginx or Apache
You'd set up a DNS record pointing your domain at the VPS's IP address. When someone visits your website, their HTTP requests will be routed to port 80 or 443 on the VPS. Nginx will be listening on those ports, and forward (aka proxy) the requests to Node, which will respond back to Nginx, which will then send the response back to the user.
There are of course security and availability concerns that are now your responsibility to handle and configure correctly in order to reach the same level of security and availability provided by a good PaaS. That's what you're paying the PaaS for. However, it is not too difficult to reach a level of security and availability that is more than sufficient for a small, free web app such as this one.
Or they're optimizing for not being a sysadmin, which some people can't do and even some of the people who can find to be very ungratifying work. For a project that runs on this person's enthusiasm, that seems not crazy.
It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3 bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test that all once a month, etc... but if I had to write out a list of things that I enjoy doing and a list of things that I don't, that work would feature heavily on the "yeah, but no" list.
Yes, if you don't want to do that work and are happy to pay someone else to take care of it, then that is great. But if you like making free web apps, relying on a PaaS will get expensive.
If you become a sysadmin, not only do you save $100 per month but you can also add it to your CV.
DHH (Rails founder) thinks you should dare to connect a server to the internet: https://world.hey.com/dhh/dare-to-connect-a-server-to-the-in...
(I already submitted this once, but given the discussion here, I think it's worth posting again, if my rate limit allows it)
> The merchants of complexity thrive when they can scare you into believing that even the simplest things are too dangerous to even attempt by yourself these days.
Awesome first sentence! I know I'm going to agree with the article just by that. This applies to so many things in life, too. We're been taught that so many things people routinely did in the past are now scary and impossible.
> you can also add it to your CV
That can backfire and give an employer the idea you want to do that work though. I not only hate it, but nobody gives a damn until stuff breaks and then everyone is mad. You rarely get rewarded for stuff silently sitting there and working.
edit: to be clear, I think doing it yourself once is great experience. And I've run small web apps on a single server, all the way from supervisord -> nginx -> passenger -> rails with pg and redis. I'd rather build features or work on marketing.
Yeah, I'm confused too. Running some sort of VPS would totally do the job, no?
I'm fairly sure you could host this on a last-gen Raspberry PI at home, if you live close to where your users are :)
Definitely don't need a last gen. Someone else did the math upthread and came to one request every 20 seconds, which if you factor in burstiness and that if you have a particularly bad burst that slows down the system a little, the next request will take even longer etc. (ask me how I learned that lesson), it's probably good to budget for it handling multiple requests per second. For this application, my understanding is you've got a handful of people in your group that you're splitting a couple of expenses with, so data processing is small beans and that'll definitely run on a first gen Pi if you optimise it properly, or perhaps a 2nd-3rd gen if you don't want to spend the time
Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!
> A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community.
And this is why open source will finally die, because being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.
A better way to "give back to the community", instead of making open source software, would be to purchase software from other indie developers.
> People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!
We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).
> being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.
edit: remved anecdote
The cost of living will never rise so much that the upper 50% can't easily make enough money. (Otherwise what? The other 150 million people go homeless?)
And unless our industry sees a major shift, which I don't see happening, software engineers will continue being comfortably in the upper 50%.
> We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).
That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.
When I write open source libraries I consider the ones benefitting to be the general public.
Even if my libraries were used only by mega corporations (which they aren't) there would still be a benefit to the public: If companies have lower cost, they will charge lower prices, benefitting customers / the general public. (And yes, they will lower prices. Most markets are not monopolies.)
Open source never benefits the general public, because open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public.
Instead, open source mainly benefits other developers. But at the end of the chain there has to be a product that is of use for non-developers. Because developing isn't for developments sake. And the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made.
If FOSS people made complete products which were end user friendly, I'd buy the argument of benefitting the general public.
> developing isn't for developments sake.
[citation needed]
> the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made
Which means that they can offer their product for a lower price, which then benefits the general public.
Companies being able to operate cheaper / more efficiently does benefit the general public, as long as the market isn't a monopoly. And as per my above comment, most markets are not monopolies.
> open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public
I've been using Audacity, Gimp, Inkscape, uBlock Origin, and many others long before I knew what FOSS means.
That's why I make all my software AGPL now.
I haven't published any software at all recently. But if I did (anything non-trivial), it would be AGPL. Or even SSPL.
Permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Unlicense, public domain, etc) is a scam to make you work for companies for free - if your software is worth anything to them, that is. They told developers they should use MIT licenses so more people would use their software. That's true. They didn't ask whether that was a good thing.
"Open source will finally die" said on a website likely running on some linux-based server, with some JS frontend, some open source/commercially licensed DB, and communicating with protocols regulated by a non-profit organization. Also in the future maybe reading this page from a device using a RISC-V processor. Sure.
I hope it brings a tear of joy to the corner of the eyes of those selfless FOSS programmers that they've done their share to help Y Combinator be worth $600 000 000 000. That money is surely better spent on people who deserve it better.
If anything is dying it's proprietary software. Which is great for all of us because open source is vastly more efficient system.
To be fair they're not heavily soliciting donations, and even actively say that they don't need them. So it's not surprising people don't prioritise giving anything. Many users probably haven't even thought of it
Are you the guy with the https://osspledge.com/ billboards around San Francisco? Haha. They’re funny. I enjoyed the art. If it’s actually you, I’d be curious who the illustrator is or if you used generative AI.
I'm not that guy, I'm against open source and free loading. Why would multi million dollar CEOs give anything to FOSS programmers when they're developing their crucial infrastructure for free?
Work for free for huge companies so they can make billion dollar profits while at the same time demanding unionization. Refusing to sell your work to consumers who are willing to pay, yet happy to provide free tech support to free loaders who wouldn't give you a cent. What's the logic?
> What's the logic?
Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our excess production with the world.
Like any other good work, it does not require acknowledgement or reciprocation, and the benefits are not part of a zero-sum economy where the giver is harmed by any action of the receiver.
You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS. Why does it offend you so much that other people prioritize forms of compensation differently than you do?
> You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS.
That's true, I'm the chief anti-OSS crusader on HN and online. I'll give it a rest after this thread, to breathe and give all a chance to recover strength.
> Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our excess production with the world.
Selling those things is still sharing with the world. Most paid software is cheap to purchase.
If FOSS was an eco system where end users had the common(?) courtesy to donate just a little bit to at least one of the projects they use, then I'd have nothing to say. But whenever I use any FOSS code and donate, I usually find myself alone with two or three other people who have donated.
Unlike most other professions, programming is something most people start with as a hobby in young years. So maybe they don't value their own hard work and effort, even though they've matured past the young hobbyist phase? And then they get misguided by open source activists to labour for free.
A young artist who publishes their songs online for free in the hopes of becoming famous, will still retain copyright on those works. No record label can come around and start selling those songs without even letting the artist know. Much less stealing and selling the songs of a well-established artist if he/she decides to release music for free.
I just don't like free loading, and I don't like enablers either.
I've been going down the VPS rabbit hole lately since I have some toy projects I want to host and really don't like the unpredictable pricing model of these "pay as you go" providers like Vercel. E.g. I really love Supabase but it's hard to justify jumping straight to the $25/month plan in combination with Vercel costs.
I was surprised how extremely easy it is to get set up with Coolify on a Hetzner VPS, which has preset install options for NextJS + Supabase + Posthog + many others. And I get the standard autodeploy on commit functionality. The open-source versions are missing some features, and I don't get the slick Vercel admin interface, but for a pet project it works great. I'm also by no means a sysadmin expert, but with ChatGPT it's pretty easy to figure things out now.
For reference, 100 dollars a month gets you this bare metal server on hetzner: Intel® Core™ i9-13900, 64 GB DDR5 ECC, 2 x 1.92 TB
... Should be more than enough to handle 2 requests per minute, could probably handle 100x of that.
My i5-6600k at home can handle ~15k requests per second for a toy social media app with postgresql assembling the xml to send to the client (though I've done some batching optimization and used rust for my application server to hit that). Passmark cpubenchmark suggests a 13900 should be 6-8x more capable than that.
So it should be able to handle somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000,000x the required load, or maybe 100,000x without the application level optimization.
(TLS reduces this by a factor of ~10 if you're doing handshakes each time. Despite what blogs claim, as far as I can tell, if your CPU doesn't have QAT, TLS is very expensive)
If you're on Hetzner you can get a load balancer with TLS termination for $5/month. It's hidden in the cloud category but fully supports dedicated servers.
Of course doing SSL on the server itself is more secure, but if that's a performance bottleneck the load balancer can be a cost effective compromise
Yes Cloudflare and all of that but they’ll do it for free.
Then you get to determine gains you may get from caching and other potential optimizations from one of the best eyeball connected providers in the world. Oh plus the ability to fend off the largest DDoS attacks ever seen.
Cloudflare tunnels enable you to do all of this through an encrypted tunnel without exposing the machine/services to the internet at all. Cloudflare will still MITM all traffic but so does Hetzner (obviously). At least with the tunnel the connection is persistent so you don’t incur TLS handshaking, etc CPU overhead with each client connection.
Bonus points - you can move hosting providers without any hassle, configure hosting provider redundancy (Hetzner + whoever), all of that stuff.
So that's how vercel makes their money.
That’s, and a bunch of twitter “indie hackers” who get traffic spikes that result in hundreds of dollars bills. Seriously, just get a VPS