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by mrozbarry 801 days ago
I'm working with a client on a greenfield project and I picked postgres as the tech stack. For the staging server, I just locally installed postgres, configured it, and it works perfectly fine. On the flip side, I'd rather just focus on code, and if there's a free tier (which neon has), I'd rather shell that off to a service.

So, my question is, what trade offs am I making other than a persistant/local db to off-site (ie probably a degree of speed). Since it's free, does that mean my data might be inspected? I'm under an NDA, and my client would prefer his data stays in-house unless there's a good reason for it not to be.
2 comments
mbil 801 days ago
The free tier gets spun down to idle after five minutes of inactivity. The first request after that usually fails to connect as it takes a few seconds for it to come back up.
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tristan957 801 days ago
Neon cold starts are targeted at just a few hundred milliseconds. Anything on the order of seconds would be a regression in our minds. Obviously this depends on geographical latencies, etc. We are always looking to improve cold starts.

(Neon engineer)

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mbil 801 days ago
Hmm maybe my application's db pool settings need to be tweaked then. In any case the UX is nice and setup was super easy, thanks!
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tristan957 801 days ago
If you're a paying customer, please reach out to support. If you're on the free tier, join the discord, and we can try and help too.
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mbil 800 days ago
I'm on the free tier. In my case it looks like adding `app.config["SQLALCHEMY_ENGINE_OPTIONS"] = {"pool_pre_ping": True}` for the Flask-SQLAlchemy configuration did the trick. I hope to be a paying customer soon :)
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tristan957 801 days ago
We do not inspect user data. We don't even connect to user databases, unless given permission to. You can read our privacy policy here: https://neon.tech/privacy-policy.

Neon will never be as fast as a database local on your computer, but performance is always something we are paying attention to.

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devjab 801 days ago
If you’re aiming for EU compliance you’re going to need to host the data within the EU and only have EU staff have any sort of access, like running support on it. Microsoft is exempt from that last bit for some reason, but they are Microsoft so they probably cheat.

Won’t be a lot of EU enterprise that will be capable of using your services without rather strict compliance. Which may or may not be in your interest but you might as well just be up front about it. With the way EU is heading in regards to data protection it may not just be enterprise organisations either by 2025. Those compliance laws are getting stricter and stricter by the day.

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tristan957 801 days ago
We support EU regions. Our sales team is happy to talk more about our data compliance.
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