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Comment by Beltiras | Hacker News Reader

I can slash about 4000 of those dollars down to 600 by renting hardware to run those services on. Makes you responsible for your setup but if you are bootstrapping, you can find better first year uses for 3400 dollars I'm sure.

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At the time, I was eager to build the app and focus on its features and getting it online. I don't know much about renting hardware, setting up a system, and scaling, so I was gladly willing to pay to make that easier on myself. The $3400 lost actually bought me a lot more of my own time, which I consider more valuable in the long run. I'd be interested in reading a blog post about how you'd slash the cost, if you ever end up writing one.

Good analysis - this sounds like a smart strategy. Best of luck running Cushion!!

From the heroku costs, it looks like you are using one web dyno and 2 workers dyno. The database is on standard.0, which is the first base tier production level database they offer. There's no reason you couldn't host all these on one server on digital ocean. I don't really know what load your server is getting, but seeing as you only need one dyno, it's probably not much so one server should suffice.

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# Pros of setting up your own host.

- Huge cost savings.

# Cons

- Heroku is way easier to scale, just drag the slider. Upgrading databases / redis is still a pain. I recommend going with RedisCloud instead of Heroku Redis. With database you have to do a migration and copy the data over.

- Having to deal with securing your own server and maintenance.

- High upfront cost due to setup

At the end of the day, it's about what your time is worth :). There's no right answer. I go with Heroku myself. The instant gratification is hard to beat.

You also have to worry about failure of that server or that colo in the "rent a server" case.

Then it was a good decision for you. Time vs money should always be weighed carefully. I tell people: "If you have IT expertise, use it to keep efficiency. Otherwise, outsource it and focus on what you do best."

Even if you do have IT expertise, it's often more efficient to outsource it for your own projects (while selling your IT expertise to the highest bidder).

It's to be decided on a case by case basis. I used to deploy whole infrastructure outside the wiring in a day with little mgmt overhead. The trick was doing as much ahead of time as possible. Each success fed into next project.

That's why I recommended in a other comment using people that do stuff similar to what you need and split cost among several companies.

My tips don't even warrant a blogpost. CentOS + KVM then segment the bare metal into VMs to do the services. One machine hosts an nginx I port forward to from the host. Figuring out how to use iptables was the most time consuming bit.

To be completely honest with you, Heroku isn't your problem, yeah SSL is pretty high, but that's okay... The fonts is your killer.

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