Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

At the point you care about backups and standby nodes, you're already sort of outside the cheapo hobby tier.

As for getting the $5/month option: Digitalocean Droplets have a 1-click Dokku install, and you can use https://github.com/dokku/dokku-postgres to instantly pop up a postgres instance.

View on HN

That's kind of fair. I've been doing some thinking since posting this, and I've been sort of debating what a "reasonable $5/mo version" of this would be. The more I think about what managed database services usually entail, the more I concede that my original request probably isn't really a viable product (unless it was a "free tier"-style loss leader). Like, disk space and bandwidth aren't really the primary cost involved.

I think what I really want is managed backups that live outside of my box, and the ability quickly restore from one if my database crashes or becomes unusable. I think automated failover to another node may not be a reasonable ask for such a cheap product.

Of course, at that point: I could spin up a 1GB DigitalOcean volume for $0.10/mo, and set up scripts to run `pg_dump` every couple hours, clean the volume of older backups to free up space, and ideally a script to reset the database to a given volume. _That's all stuff I don't want to do_, but maybe someone's built a reusable set of scripts for it or something - that Dokku container is promising as a starting point, though I'm a little annoyed it only works with S3(-compatible).

Dokku is a management platform kinda like a self-hosted Heroku.

I've used it instead of Flynn in the past with a lot of success.

Edit: If S3 is the problem, backup to a minio instance on your dokku (https://github.com/slypix/minio-dokku)

I suppose I could also use DO's Spaces, which is S3-compatible, though also has an annoying minimum (I do not need the 250 gigs you get for $5/mo) https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/

> At the point you care about backups and standby nodes, you're already sort of outside the cheapo hobby tier

WTF? Why would anyone ever not care about backups?

Was about to chime in the same... dokku is great for the hobbiest/cheapish tiers... I wouldn't go below a $10/mo instance, but you can throw a surprising amount of work at it at the lower end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com