I discovered Litestream here on HN after benbjohnson shared it here a few months back.[0] I wasn't interested at first because I don't ever use SQLite, but it stuck with me. I eventually realized it's a great way to achieve vendor flexibility in hosting apps, so I used Litestream to build a pastebin-style service for my app and wanted to share what I learned.
Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback about this post.
In terms of latency alone it sounds like it risks adding tens or even hundreds of milliseconds to even a fairly trivial request: out of my datacenter, across the wire, into theirs, grab the data, and then reverse the path. And perhaps a charge for data going out each way.
Am I wrong about that? Am I overestimating the travel time, or perhaps they end up being located in the same datacenter so it's all high speed?
The OP's approach of SQLite & Litestream removes that latency entirely since the database is colocated with the application. Litestream will stream backups to an external service (e.g. S3) and that can have tens or hundreds of milliseconds of latency but that won't affect the application's performance since it is asynchronous replication.
what is the performance like for a database server that's separated from your host like that?