[jarebear6expepj]

I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live.

I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe frameworks on $5 dollar VPS's and lost interest. 2021 I sold the remaining three income generating websites for just shy of 1mill US.

I started the projects with a second person but ended up buying out their interest and running solo. I consider it success because I managed to last over a decade making on avg $400,000/year gross with that business "umbrella".

Advertising and publishing changed and continues to change by leaps and bounds on a yearly schedule. A lot good a lot bad, but its the same business over the years.

[anyfactor]

Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps?

I built an MVP on a 5 dollar VPS. But I had to recently upgrade to a 12 dollar VPS as some of my analytics process were being stopped because of low memory. Aside from writing better code, I found out that using linux utils/app via system calls is the most effective solution as nothing I can write can ever be even remotely as performant as something like grep.

I am following a similiar path to yours but my stack is a bit complicated.

Python + SQLite on VPS

Vue/Nuxt + Auth on Firebase

The process is extremely hacky and experimental, so it might change. I am not planning to use a proper backend as the Python scripts communicates to the Firebase via its SDK. That is working for me at this moment and eliminates writing boilerplate API code.

[jarebear6expepj]

> Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps?

I don't know... from what I've used of Python it is pretty memory heavy and doesn't do well left alone unsupervised. I could be wrong but that was my experience trying various Py web frameworks.

My app servers were all $5 VPS with only nginx, PHP/php-fpm, and Memcached. PHP was cached, nginx assets were cached, and data was cached in RAM with Memcached which was updated from remote DB server on cache expire.

I would then stack as many of those behind a load balancer as needed (nginx as reverse proxy basically) and scaled up to serving 100's of terabytes of data monthly and billions of page views.

So while it was "$5 VPS" it was really a small cloud of them behind another $5 vps as a load balancer with a $25 database server supporting the data. Still cheaper than Amazon for equivalent loads.

[anyfactor]

Thank you very much. The only thing I can think of while reading your comment was, "wow this is elegant."

Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind license/supporting deal? Although a more marketable solution will be a redis + node based stack.

[jarebear6expepj]

> "wow this is elegant." > Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind > license/supporting deal

uhhh it's really just a basic install of freebsd and a bunch of shell scripts! As far as I'm concerned anyone with a bit of time could google fu themselves in to production.

I am always happy to, and have, contracted to build similar setups for other people for CDN delivery, etc, but that was just another day in the life of a sysadmin basically.

Email in profile if you have any other questions.

[anyfactor]

Thank you very much for the inspiration. I appreciate your insights.

[batmaniam]

Did you use a dedicated database from the start of your project? Or did you use a simpler one like sqlite and then scaled up to your current architecture when you got more users/load to your site?

[jarebear6expepj]

I started with MySQL from the beginning because it is the DB engine I knew.

Over the years I have played with sqlite and postgress. I keep coming back to Mariadb for my web apps.

[wcedmisten]

Not OP, but I started up a project running Postgres, a Python backend (with FastAPI), and a NextJS frontend on the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet. Hosting+domain came to $7.68/mo

I can't say it's had very much production load testing, but using the site myself it seems to work fine.

https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/stateful-webapp-on-7-68-budget/

https://github.com/wcedmisten/python-nextjs-template

[anyfactor]

Thank you for sharing.

I use mainly flask and restful flask. However restful flask has been deprecated, so I was really interested in FastAPI. Then someone pointed out the number of open issues on the FastAPI project, so I got spooked. Flask maybe has quite a few frameworks for implementing rest API. Not sure what the future holds for Flask.

As you pointed out

> A backend comes with all sorts of baggage: databases, managing user data, authentication, backups, and increased server load.

With Flask being a microframework and barebones, going through this list becomes a chore unless you have built dozens of webapp and have some kind of template.

So I kinda gave up on web-backend entirely and moved towards firebase. Most of the complicated stuff will happen on the VPS side of things and will be communicated to firebase via the SDK.

[foolswisdom]

I always liked fastapi and didn't have any problems, so your comment on issues made me check. Currently there are 16 open issues.

However, I believe (based on vague memories) that there used to be a ton of issues on the fastapi repo that were basically support requests. Going throw some closed issues, it seems that these were closed and/or converted to discussions.

[wcedmisten]

Yeah that sounds like a good choice for managing complexity.

Probably a trade-off with cost I'm guessing. For my project I was trying to get the cost as low as possible, since it's just a side project for me.

Interesting point about the open issues, I didn't notice that, but does seem like it could be an issue for the longevity of the project.

[lightning19]

I run a SaaS that makes between $1000-$2000/yr on a $5 VM. My operations are as follows:

On the VM:

- Nodejs + React SSR

- Nginx

- Certbot to manage my SSL cert

- Integrated with Grafana's cloud service (free tier)

Outside of the VM:

- Managed MongoDB cluster

- API health check's every 3 min with email alerts (I use multiple uptime services to check from different regions) - DB backup cron jobs, backups are stored in 2 cloud providers

- Service desk for customer's to send queries/raise issues

- Alerts if CPU/RAM usage is too high (never got an alert for the past 2 years)

I also nuke the VM once a year and re-provision otherwise you have to maintain the OS, do cleanup etc.

Future work:

- Find way to backup my DNS records

- Probably need to monitor the SSL cert expiration in case certbot breaks

- CI/CD

[anyfactor]

That is really awesome.

> nuke the VM once a year and re-provision otherwise you have to maintain the OS, do cleanup etc

That is really interesting. What are you using to re-setup your entire infrastructure after purging a VM? How do you manage the down time between one vm purge to setting up the next one.

I would love to know, going beyond the VPS what is your total infrastructure + maintenance cost.

[lightning19]

Thanks :)

I set things up again on the new VM manually. I have a runbook for it, usually takes me 30 mins or less.

To not have any downtime I keep the old VM up and attach a new public IP to the new VM. I then update the DNS records and after a while when the new IP is mapped to my domain I then stop the old VM.

Costs:

Managed Mongodb cluster: $9 but I share it between multiple side projects so let's say $3

API health checks - free! I use digital ocean and fresh ping

Service Desk - free! I use Jira

DNS: Usually $0.3

DB backups: within the free tier on both cloud providers. I have it set to only keep the last x backups so this should always be free

Cron job to run the backup: I have a serverless function for this, still within the free tier

SSL cert - free because I use let's encrypt

Docker image storage costs: <$1

Total ~$9.5

[nerdyadventurer]

Can you please say the services you use for DNS, Docker image storage?

[lightning19]

DNS - I use GCP as the domain was purchased with domains.google because I get free email addresses which I can receive and reply to from my personal gmail (e.g. [e-mail]). I'm not 100% sure if this setup will work with another DNS provider.

Docker Image - Since I'm running this most of the operation on AWS I use ECR

[anyfactor]

Truly incredible. Thank you very much sharing.

[jesterson]

It's very simple - avoid unnecessary and overcomplicated "cool" frameworks/technologies which modern development is infested as old house.

I run heavy traffic EC sites on $20-30 VPS and can't imagine why you would need more, unless you do data analysis on same node.

Fancy things like Vue/Nuxt are cool, but do you actually need it?

[zhte415]

Measure how long a response takes, shave that.

Count how many responses you're providing for a single request. Reduce them.

See what can be done in parallel or out of order, do that.

Check requests through time of day. Eliminate overload.

[winrid]

Sqlite is cool but you'll find Postgres will perform a lot better on average and not use much more resources (it only needs like 16mb of ram by default...).

[anyfactor]

> it only needs like 16mb of ram by default

TIL. Thank you very much.

I always wanted to invest more time in postgres, but I just find the Windows environment to be clunky when working with it. Like psql isn't supported in a windows environment (last time I check few months ago), and setting up the postgres environment on WSL was quite annoying as you have to figure out port forwarding.

I know setting up a postgres on a local machine directly or even without docker may not be a mature decision, but that is the hacky reason, why I keep going back to sqlite, as it is the easiest solution to get started with a database.

[winrid]

If you're using an IDE, many have DB browsers built right in (all jetbrains IDEs for ex).

But hey, nothing wrong with easy, usually. :)

[solumunus]

Nonsense. For read heavy content sites Sqlite will obviously perform better.

[winrid]

That depends on the read patterns. Sqlite doesn't even support some features that will make very simple aggregations much faster on postgres, even with the same indexes.

For purely sequential reads of data from disk, sure.

[patja]

is there anything preventing a continuous "rinse and repeat" cycle of creating Mormon dating sites for purchase and shutdown by the church?

[jarebear6expepj]

To the point, I offered them the .org of the .com they were buying, and they were not interested. I never did it, but wondered what would happen if I just... booted it up. Maybe I'll try it some day.

[jasonm23]

I was inspired to do the same, however, there are now at least 2 dating apps that cater specifically to Mormons.

I think the time when the church thought they could buy out that market segment, has passed.

[jarebear6expepj]

There were other Mormon specific dating sites/apps while I started mine. I might have been the only one aggressively buying print ad space on BYU Provo campus with nice photography and taglines like "Meet Your Five Cow Wife Today On [...]" so I maybe added some visibility. And they saw my ad spends directly I would assume.

[tyingq]

Makes me wonder what other types of sites/apps the blind broker might have instructions to buy out.

[operatingthetan]

Heck just populate it with LLMs.

[schwifty1]

I'm really interested in what you did, because it sounds like what I'm trying to do!

Are you able to help me with these questions?

1. How did you decide which services to start? Did you have any criteria on what types of services you did and didn't want to start?

2. Was all of the income from those services advertising? Or were you charging users directly for some?

3. After it was built, how did you market a service and attract users?

[djbusby]

Lot of work to keep the ad money coming in or was that just a Google AdWords?

[jarebear6expepj]

Ads were the easy part once I stopped trying to run the ad containers and servers myself. When I started it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders which ended at Google typically. When header bidding came out it made the advertising world orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

[HWR_14]

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

Well, not end users. They're getting ads.

But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be true.

[jarebear6expepj]

>Well, not end users. They're getting ads.

I think advertising is a powerful way to support 'free'ish content and there are ways to use advertising tastefully. People who don't want to participate have options to opt out and are obviously welcome to not make server requests.

[qup]

I'm supposed to accurately predict whether a website will serve me ads or not, before I've ever connected to it?

Right, not sure why we didn't think of that sooner.

[jarebear6expepj]

Always wear a helmet when browsing the World Wide Web.

[selcuka]

> it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders

> Well, not end users. They're getting ads.

Why not? Would you prefer ads, or ads with terrible javascript loaders?

[HWR_14]

I would prefer ads with terrible javascript loaders, as they are easier to more completely and reliably block.

[selcuka]

The ads still use javascript; they are just not as "terrible" (a.k.a. waterfall).

[kljsclfdsklj]

Lol what are you talking about? Any improvement in conversion rate is going to help the publisher, the network and the ad buyer.

I’ll just ignore the part about what you said about end users other than to say it’s arguable.

[jarebear6expepj]

When I say 'end user' I guess I am talking about the sheer amount of Javascript loading and computation they no longer had to put up with jumping through waterfalls. Header bidding fixed that which meant that javascript based ads loaded in a significantly more efficient and sane way. Privacy, etc is obviously a different issue.

[HWR_14]

> Any improvement in conversion rate is going to help the publisher, the network and the ad buyer.

Since ad buyers pay per conversion, I don't actually think it helps them to increase the conversion rate.

[fdaslkjlkj23]

Don't be dense. If you pay $5 per conversion, and earn $10 per conversion, you make $5 profit as an ad buyer. What happens if you have 2 conversions? 3? 20? You make more profit.

Alternatively think about the flipside, how in the world could you possibly think having a lower conversion rate is good for the ad buyer? A 0% rate?

[b20000]

how were you able to get that type of traffic and revenue without spending serious money on ads?

[acegopher]

How did you sell? What was your multiple? Did you use a broker?

[jarebear6expepj]

I was approached directly in both sales. I personally never used a broker-- just kept a lawyer and my accountant handy. The last sale was roughly 3x multiple.

[randombits0]

> most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live.

That’s our Hitler!