[llambda]

I'm coming around to building everything for a VPS from the outset. There's a lot of upside to VPSes, such as:

1. Can be purchased as a fixed cost, usually at a rate that's much cheaper than on-demand pricing, and especially serverless--this tends to only get better with time as competition keeps prices low

2. It's "just" a Unix/Windows/Mac box, so the issues with runtime constraints you mention are bounded differently (and often more favorably); serverless is also just a box, but the constraints tend to be more onerous and limiting and it's not usually accessible in the same way

3. With containers, it's trivial to move between providers, so the hardware itself becomes fungible

4. On containers, I'm having a great time shipping Docker Compose configs--this works really well for the scale of application I'm targeting while avoiding the dreaded complexity of e.g. k8s

5. There's decades of high quality tooling already built and battle tested which makes operating VPSes much easier; the fact you can SSH into the machine, for instance, has huge leverage as an solo person working on independent products

Going forward, I'm planning to skip edge compute altogether unless there's a really compelling reason to want it. I should also mention that when a VPS is paired with a CDN, you can layer on bits of "edge compute" where it's warranted; or, you know, use it to cache static assets close to your users. :)

All-in-all it's kind of a funny return to where I started ~20 years or so ago with web development.

[davnicwil]

> it's kind of a funny return to where I started ~20 years or so ago with web development

It's a journey I've been going on too.

All the new platforms and paradigms that have emerged have had an initial shallow aura of helpfulness that has drawn me in, but almost exclusively when digging in I've realised that they create more issues than they solve, and/or introduce limitations that aren't worth it and force me to write janky, overly complicated code to work around that isn't comprehensible even a few weeks hence.

Maybe the most notable exception to this is containers. But in a sense they're an abstraction over the very same VPS paradigm. So that makes sense. It's not something new or different, just the same thing but with some advantages (and disadvantages too, obviously).

[klabb3]

If VPSs had the same marketing and maybe a bit more polished standard tooling I have a feeling it would quickly gain traction and simplify life for most people. As well as prevent vendor lock-in, of course.

It’s in the SaaS business model. The incentives, even for fully open source like supabase, is misaligned with self-hosting. Even if they’re super honest and trying to be helpful, their fully managed globally available offering is going to have very different needs than self-hosters.

I actually more like the model of having FOSS where the company behind it offers consulting instead, to build, deploy and operate the product for customers who lack the in-house expertise. It’s not perfect, but it helps align the incentives towards simplicity.

[satvikpendem]

I've been using Coolify on a Hetzner VPS, it works great, it's like an open source Heroku that works through Docker and Compose.

[_cenw]

I had a look at it and it seemed interesting, but then I spotted the `-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock`.

[popcorncowboy]

In case anyone's wondering, that gives the container root level access to the host's Docker daemon. A big potential security hole.

[_cenw]

It's also just generally wrong to build a scheduler on top of the docker API. We have CRI for a reason, because everyone knows Docker is not going to be around forever. Certainly not the company. Maybe dockerd.

[015a]

> usually at a rate that's much cheaper than on-demand pricing

This is an area that is legitimate swindling/inflation by hosted app providers (e.g. DO Apps, Heroku, Render, Fly, etc). Oftentimes the per-vCPU/memory price is inflated over the underlying cost, even relative to a rather expensive underlying provider like AWS; which they'll reasonably justify by saying that this is the value-add, yeah you pay more but its more managed. But: when you have underlying access to the VPS, you can host more than one process! Which, of course, they're oftentimes doing on their end to cut costs.

Serverless functions can legitimately fall into the "always cheaper" category. If you've got twenty apps that each get request volume in the range of dozens-to-thousands per month; you could host that on a $5/mo VPS, or you could pay a few cents for a FaaS (Lambda, GCP, Cloudflare Workers, etc, all priced in the same magnitude). But the price-to-scale chart of serverless functions is really weird; they do hit a point where they're more expensive than just, you know, running a web server on a VPS. That point isn't at a super low volume, but its not far off from where its something to think about for a typical software organization. If I had a personal project that hit that point, I'd classify it as a good problem to have.

I also feel endless frustration in how there legit isn't a single cloud provider out there that (1) offers a serverless functions runtime, and (2) gives you the ability to set a non-zero budget which turns off the world when you go over budget. Many offer free tiers with no credit card, and some are even generous (Vercel and Firebase are two good examples), but I won't build on a free tier. I want to pay you. So, you upgrade and give a credit card, and now you're liable for one fuck-up bankrupting you, or throwing you on your knees at the mercy of their customer support. The severity of this fuck-up ranges from "my GCP account does just use a VPS, but egress is unlimited, so the bill was a bit high this month" to "the new dev changed a lambda function to call another which called the first one, and our bill is now the GDP of a developing nation-state".

The vast majority of the managed infrastructure world is, unfortunately, B2B swindlers just trying to out-swindle each other, only possible because they're all buying from each other, constantly raising prices, finding new ways to bill their customers, and losing any grip on the true (extremely low) reality of their costs. Supabase is better than most. I really do appreciate releases like this one. I'd also add Cloudflare to my list of "good ones"; they've taken a hard stance against charging for bandwidth, and I think that single decision had controlled a ton of the incremental costs we see from their newer higher-level product offerings like Workers.