How I Built a Side Project

stayintech.com

9 points·userium··5 comments

This is exactly why i tend to tell people to overthing if they really want to go with Heroku or AWS. It gets super expensive very fast, and all you essentially would need is a small VPS (~$5 a month, like on digital ocean) and a SSL wildcart cert which is somewhere between $50 and $100 yearly.

Or, if that is not the only venture you plan, get a stronger box for like $20 a month. And you never have to worry about any servers for projects again until they really get popular enough to need more resources.

Also using cloudflare can help to save up on some resources as well.

I bookmarked your project btw :)

You can further save by using something like Letscrypt[1] to handle your SSL for free:

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/

I dont know why, but everytime i mentioned SSL in the past weeks somebody came up and mentioned letsencrypt. Usually rather irrelevant.

No, they dont offer Wirdcard certs.

Author here, happy to get feedback!

Have you, at any point, thought "This seems like such a niche^, marginal idea, people will never use it coz it just seems outright unnecessary and useless, perhaps I should just be doing something else"? How did you answer it for yourself while you were working on it? How do you feel about it now after you've spent some time/money and shut it down, in return of getting the experience that you've got?

I'm not trying to berate your project in any way by the way, shipping a real project is one of the highest values any of us can uphold, but the above thought about [random-niche-idea-here] is what keeps me (and I presume many others) from actually executing.

^ "niche" not as in "a specialized but profitable corner of the market.", but as in "something that's sucked out of thumb and doesn't seem to have a wide practical need/use", sorry couldn't find a good word to describe that.

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