| When you're a solo SaaS developer/company owner, the dedicated server option really shines. I get a 10x lower price and no downsides that I've ever seen. "But are your database backups okay?" Yeah, I coded the backup.sh script and confirmed that it works. The daily job will kick up a warning if it ever fails to run. "But don't you need to learn Linux stuff to configure it?" Yeah, but I already know that stuff, and even if I didn't, it's probably easier to learn than AWS's interfaces. "But what if it breaks and you have to debug it?" Good luck debugging an AWS lambda job that won't run or something; your own hardware is way more transparent than someone else's cloud. "But don't you need reproducible configurations checked into git?" I have a setup.sh script that starts with a vanilla Ubuntu LTS box, and transforms it into a fully-working setup with everything deployed. That's the reproducible config. When it's time to upgrade to the next LTS release (every 4 years or so), I just provision a new machine and run that script again. It'll probably fail on first try because some ubuntu package name changed slightly, but that's a 5-minute fix. "But what about scaling?" One of my crazy-fast dedicated machines is equal to ~10 of your slow-ass VPSes. If my product is so successful that this isn't enough, that's a good problem to have. Maybe a second dedicated machine, plus a load balancer, would be enough? If my product gets so popular that I'm thinking about hundreds of dedicated machines, then hopefully I have a team to help me with that. |