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Comment by talldatethrow | Hacker News Reader

I run a micro saas with 34 customers, with about 300 users online at any given moment at the peak.

It's written in php, running on a $4 a month shared hosting from namecheap.

Everyone says I'll need to move it over somewhere better if it grows. How soon? Even people with experience seem to have trouble explaining when. It always fascinates me and makes me wonder how many small webapps are on AWS for no real reason.

Personally, I need cpanel and phpmyadmin because I don't know anything else really. I still ftp files up manually from my windows computer. Going to a real server seems like it would make things 10x more complicated, and no one seems to be able to predict at what point I'll need to.

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Going to a "real" server could just mean switching it up, like a $3-5 vps, sftp instead of ftp, ...? and then you can scale by just scaling up the vps. Your solution is quite good.

> are on AWS for no real reason.

One of the core offerings in AWS is EC2. Which are just shared (up to dedicated) virtual machines, and they start at a few dollars a month. I'm in no way suggesting a change to your setup, only pointing out that AWS isn't some mythical complex ecosystem.

Is namecheap running PHP8? That upgrade alone will net you a massive performance improvement over 5.x

They are, and they've had up to date versions of php basically right as they become available, and can switch easily between versions, even down to differentiating between 7.0 and 7.1 in case someone really needs to choose that finally for a specific reason.

No doubt AWS has options that could work for me at a similar price point. But I don't think it would be at all easy from what I've seen, and I'd have zero support. Compared to namecheap which basically helps me do anything I need via live help with actually useful people in my experience.

I once upgraded from a $2.50 a month server to the $4 server for a few other benefits I needed, and performance actually went DOWN at that server IP. I asked them to move me to a different one, just based on my "trust me bro, this is slower than before" and they did move me and performance returned.

Cool. PHP 8.2 is amazing.

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