Bootstrapping a site builder to $6k in monthly revenue | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrapping a site builder to $6k in monthly revenue

indiehackers.com

60 pointsChanningAllen13 comments

Just like the free and open source Microweber[1] , site-builders with a PHP back-end seem to be very slow [2].

I've asked the guys at Microweber about it and it's due to HTML parsing being slow with PHP.

I'm curious why no one chooses Golang or Elixir as a backend?

[1] https://microweber.com [2] https://support.sbpro.io/forums/topic/how-to-lower-resource-...

Probably because a PHP "app" can be installed in the vast majority of hostings' super easily, while Golang and Elixir would take a lot more effort for the average user (even if technically savvy).

If you'd know how to build a site builder using Golang or Elixir, you'd probably know how to make an installer as well.

My knowledge of Elxir is the little I learned at a 3 hour meetup showing how to build a basic chat app, I am looking forward to learning more about it, and similar languages.

I wonder if most shared hosting plans would ever allow these kinds of installers to run if they were made. I've been told on occasions by different hosts that we would need to move up to a vps to even change some settings with php ini and such.

Even with a VPS I have had hosts say that we can't run certain kinds of apps, and that we would be throttles with cpu limits and if they were constantly hit then we'd be given the option to move to dedicated server or move away from the host.

So I think a lot of the easy hosting out there may not be ready for things that take installers aside from some basic php things like wordpress (which gets us rate limited with some plugins / hosts)

I understand that it may be trivial for some people to spin up a DO droplet kind of thing and install dependencies, but even if newer web site makers can do these things, maintaining these systems with updates and security is not for the average one-click web site installer.

So it's a big issue for other reasons too I think.

Even with Wordpress, no shared host will allow you to have more than 1-2 page views per second without Caching active. This is due to CPU consumption being so high even with just 10 plugins.

When it comes to VPS, only the KVM based will allow you to use the full CPU cores since you cannot overprovision it, you can only assign the available cores until they run out.

With OpenVZ or LXC containers, you can have hundreds or even thousands of containers on a single server and have it overprovisioned. This means that you only need a few containers to use much CPU to run out of capacity.

There's certainly not much to it to have an installer make the install and maintain updates, even with bash this is just 5 commands at the most for updating a Golang app - not sure about Elixir though.

Shouldn't it be possible to add a better HTML parser as extension to PHP? They can be written in C so it can be as fast as possible.

Matt here, one of the founders of Pagestead.

Totally agree, from a technical point of view, PHP would not be our first choice (or second, or third, etc). However, since our customers need to install this on their own infrastructure, we were rather limited in options.

Go would totally be a viable option. Cross compilation for the win.

Unrelated to the actual project, I wonder how this guy manages to live in Thailand and openly discuss his earnings.

Plenty of "entrepreneurs" / backpackers / dive masters "live" in Thailand but all need to do visa runs, which is technically not allowed and certainly not while working there and probably paying no taxes on that openly declared revenue.

There aren't many options at all to work in Thailand as a freelancer for 10+ years unless you're dumping lots of money in to the country.

Not making judgements about right / wrong, just that it's most likely not legal.

Also - CodeIgniter is an interesting choice for such an app.

Maybe he had married a local and is now fully legal?

How is this different from http://grapesjs.com/

That's like asking, how is "MS Word different than LibreOffice". Some people want to build their company on the backs of paid software. User preference really.

Pagestead also appears to have pre-built components for your users to build off of.

Grapesjs is without a back-end, while Pagestead is a ready-to-go system.

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