Ask HN: Is it a good idea to spin up a VPS for each subscriber? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it a good idea to spin up a VPS for each subscriber?

5 pointsdo_spinup8 comments

My SaaS is going to be priced at much more than $5/mo, but the computation involved is fairly cheap. A $5 VPS from Linode/DigitalOcean is more than sufficient. However, latency is fairly important criteria to my application, so a dedicated VPS (as much of an oxymoron that term is) would be pretty neat.

Is it feasible to spin up a separate VPS every time I get a subscriber? They'd be paying much more than $5/mo, so the cost of the VPS would be covered.

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Better get very very good at configuration management, provisioning, patching, monitoring, and all the other things that go along with running large quantities of infra (even if virtual). I don't know anything about your app, but I do know many shops that deeply regret going down this path rather than building multi-tenant in the first place.

For what its worth, and some may disagree, but production SaaS apps don't belong on Linode/DigitalOcean... but that's a whole other topic.

What's your reasoning for that last comment? Why don't you think prod apps should be running on Linode or DO? I have experience with both and really enjoy using DO. Their infra seems solid, so just curious as to why you made that comment.

I have used both extensively and love them for dev and non production environments.

Perhaps I have some old biases, but I have gotten caught up in noisy neighbor hell more times than I can count. Being impacted by DDOS attacks on your neighbors is no fun.

Add in privacy/security compliance where they attempt to leverage their facilities SOC2 reports rather than operate their own business to this standard and it just doesn't work for me or my customers.

EDIT: FWIW, my concerns tend to come from a place much further along in the game that might not be relevant to you right now. If you're still proving your business model and this is the fastest way to get there then by all means.

Why not build a proper multi-tenant service? Do you absolutely need the compute power for each customer? What are you gonna do when 6 months down the line you need to apply a critical update to all of your servers? What about deployment? Seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble for yourself, imo.

We are doing this at SignalBox - but recently better containerisation with Docker has given us much more flexibility, and now we can dedicated host or multi tenant with very little configuration change, I’d recommend going down this route

(Some of our customers, e.g. ad tech, fx trading) have very low latency requirements do being able to dedicated host them has been good

You should have people willing to pay before you do anything. Having said that, consider, if a $5 intance can host 100 customers, that's $.05 per customer. One may ask, how does 100% increase in cost per customer make any sense?

I have thought about this before from a security point of view but the hassle of setting up and running my multiple databases wasn’t worth it.

I assume you have a database that is shared, would that not become the bottleneck in latency?

i think containers would suit you better.

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