[jjice]

I don't know if I've been doing something wrong now. For my personal web apps, I've always just installed Nginx, Let's Encrypt, and then a docker image of my application/DB. Spinning this up on a fresh Ubuntu Server install takes less than a half hour if I had to guess. Nginx to force TLS and proxy pass to my docket image.

I'm not trying to be rude, just genuinely curious if I'm missing something complex that could be making my services less secure.

[tnolet]

Heroku does that in 3 minutes. And maintains & updates that stack for you. And gives you deployment automation etc. For $7 a month.

[spookthesunset]

Exactly. Deployment is merely a "git push" away. It is amazing how simple it is to get started building a new product.

Every second you spend configuring web servers and stuff is a second you should be spending adding value to your business.

[dijit]

Deployment /can be/ a git push away, but that's only on the extreme end with things like heroku. You mentioned cloud. Cloud has cost sinks every so often (in terms of time).

Cloud has much value but please dont' consider it a panacea.

You can get a lot of value out of those 30 minutes installing a webserver; and it can save you a significant amount of cost.

Not to mention when you want to actually scale you'll see the reason why pretty clearly, unlike in cloud providers where inefficiencies can just suck up money until you notice.

And I definitely take exception to the "every _second_ you spend doing something other than business is a waste" because by that logic I shouldn't use the bathroom or take time to have a coffee.

[spookthesunset]

Businesses don't exist to save money. They exist to deliver value.

Your goal in a startup shouldn't be all about saving money like some cheapskate penny pincher. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Worrying about $100/mo in heroku bills instead of $10/mo "bobs budget webhost" bills is a waste of time. If your startup cannot afford $100/mo or even $1000/mo in infrastructure costs you probably should exist. Especially given smartly spent infrastructure costs (eg: using heroku) let you deliver value far faster than cobbling together infrastructure yourself.

Penny wise, pound foolish.

[shiftpgdn]

You are so clueless and off the mark I wonder if you're trolling or are some teenager that watching a lot of entrepreneur videos.

A dollar saved is a dollar earned. AWS is a terrible choice unless you have a huge amount of free credit. Also, an income of $4000/mo puts you into the average American household income bracket. Why would you throw away 25% of that on infrastructure to save 2 hours on the front end?

Not every startup needs to be the next Instagram. There are tons of people out there happy with their small and medium sized SAAS companies which have allowed them to leave the rat race.

[barrkel]

I think this heavily depends on your model. What if you're sticking a hundred darts in the dartboard to see what gets traction? $10K a month is going to hurt.

[herokai71726373]

Stay away from Heroku. The team has recently all moved over to work on Salesforce Evergreen and is only barely keeping the lights on.

Source: I worked there for years until very recently for this reason.

[sknzl]

You can use CapRover and additionally save the steps of nginx and Let’s encrypt. On DigitalOcean exists even a 1-Click App of it, so it’s trivial to get CapRover running on a droplet.