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by qingcharles 1049 days ago
You'd be amazed how much you can get out of one of the Hetzner $3/mo ARM servers with the right code.

I use a $6/mo box for my primary business hosting, but I have a $3/mo one that I'm using to build v2, really just to prove what's possible. If you set up your DB and caching right you can do so much with so little...

2 comments

Similarly, but on the opposite spectrum, I also wonder how far you can go on vertical scaling nowadays. For 200 EUR/month on Hetzner you get a dedicated 80-core ARM CPU, 128GB ECC RAM, 2TB SSD...using a good performance multi-threaded language, what _can't_ you run on that? It's ridiculous value.
> what _can't_ you run on that? It's ridiculous value.

Yeah - I remember a StackOverflow talk[1] where they basically said that they just vertically scale their database.

The fact that they were able to make it work tells me that most businesses should probably just go that route and avoid the headache of distributed systems[2].

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1. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stack-exchange/

2. Obviously a business should probably invest in redundancy when it comes to data (as did StackOverflow), but a pure "Raid 1" setup is the easiest of distributed systems to understand.

Those ARM boxes are incredible for the price, I'm using them to document a hobby K8S cluster because the overall cost is low enough that it won't price a hobbyist out.

You get a lot of bang for your buck out of them.

Which k8s are you using and how are you managing it?
k3s, and nothing fancy except using a splash of helm to set some things up. The cluster has an auto-updater for unattended upgrades.
Talos Linux is great.