> The whole thing runs on regular servers. Hetzner has become our cloud of choice, along with Backblaze B2 and SQS. It is written in Go. From an architecture perspective I try to keep things simple - want folks to make economical use of their servers.

Cool, glad to see Hetzner, at least presumably for compute, rather than the almost routine, absurdly expensive, mega cloud providers.

I have a few questions if you've got time.

1. What made you pick Hetzner in particular, and did you evaluate any of their primary competitors? (e.g., OVH, etc)

2. In your $100/month figure, did you decide to go with dedicated servers or the "cloud" VPS line? If the latter, was there any particular reason over going with the bare-metal offerings?

3. Are you making use of Hetzner's U.S. servers as well or is everything currently in Europe (or vice-versa)?

4. Was there any particular reason for choosing B2 and SQS as opposed to self-hosting object-storage on the SX servers?

Normally, I wouldn't even wonder why someone wouldn't want the burden of more infrastructure. But given the choice of going with relatively unmanaged Hetzner servers, presumably self-hosting clickhouse, etc, and then with your compute provider also happening to offer fairly large storage servers on the cheap, I might've been tempted to cut out the additional providers and DIY it:

- less costly for large amounts of data

- zero lock-in [1]

- fewer companies to deal with

  - likely better negotiating power with Hetzner when the time comes if a bigger percentage of your overhead is with them as opposed to spread out across three providers

  - fewer points of failure; if the Hetzner servers are down, I would assume you're in trouble anyway, so perhaps keeping [most] of your eggs on the same network might not be as bad as it sounds

  - presumably better latency and bandwidth + the ability to communicate over a private network [2]

5. I see the license is AGPL. But I don't see the usual "you must dual-license all contributions under MIT/BSD/ISC as well [so that only we can re-license the project]" nor "before contributing, sign this agreement transferring copyright [and your first born child]".

Was this just an oversight, or do you intend to be one of the few SaaS companies that really truly is open-source rather than "open-source" [until peopled are locked-in] and then going "open"-core? If the latter, then awesome -- cool to see.

6. Any regrets, disasters, or lessons learned so far? Usually, I find these stories the most interesting but unfortunately too few are willing to share.

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[1]: I know B2 provides a relatively standard, at this point, S3-compatible API and everything as well. But I think there is also still something to be said about a somewhat Juche-esque approach to infrastructure, wherein should prices rise, contracts change, service degrades, or whatever else, you'd have the ability to almost immediately switch at a moment's notice to literally anyone else who can lease you a box with some hard drives or any colo provider.

[2]: This goes out the window somewhat if you're using the VPS line and American servers, though.