Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned.

One note: you can absolutely use Python or Node just as well as Go. There's Hetzner that offers 4GB RAM, 10TB network (then 1$/TB egress), 2CPUs machines for 5$.

Two disclaimers for VPS:

If you're using a dedicated server instead of a cloud server, just don't forget to backup DB to a Storage box often (3$ /mo for 1TB, use rsync). It's a good practice either way, but cloud instances seem more reliable to hardware faults. Also avoid their object store.

You are responsible for security. I saw good devs skipping basic SSH hardening and get infected by bots in <1hr. My go-to move when I spin up servers is a two-stage Terraform setup: first, I set up SSH with only my IP allowed, set up Tailscale and then shutdown the public SSH IP entrypoint completely.

Take care and have fun!

Personally for backups I’d avoid using a product provided by the same company as the VM I’m backing up. You should be defending against the individual VM suffering corruption of some kind, needing to roll back to a previous version because of an error you made, and finally your VM provider taking a dislike to you (rationally or otherwise) and shutting down your account.

If you’re backing up to a third party losing your account isn’t a disaster, bring up a VM somewhere else, restore from backups, redirect DNS and you’re up and running again. If the backups are on a disk you can’t access anymore then a minor issue has just escalated to an existential threat to your company.

Personally I use Backblaze B2 for my offsite backups because they’re ridiculously cheap, but other options exist and Restic will write to all of them near identically.

> You are responsible for security. I saw good devs skipping basic SSH hardening and get infected by bots in <1hr. My go-to move when I spin up servers is a two-stage Terraform setup: first, I set up SSH with only my IP allowed, set up Tailscale and then shutdown the public SSH IP entrypoint completely.

Note that you don't need all of that to keep your SSH server secure. Just having a good password (ideally on a non-root account) is more than enough.

About security, wall of shame story,

Once I had Postgresql db with default password on a new vps, and forgetting to disable password based login, on a server with no domain. And it got hacked in a day, and was being used as bot server. And that was 10 years ago.

Recently deployed server, and was getting ssh login attempts within an hour, and it didn't had a domain. Fortunately, I've learned my lesson, and turned of password based login as soon as the server was up and running.

And similar attempts bogged down my desktop to halt.

Having an machine open to the world is now very scary. Thanks God for service like tailscale exists.

I need more info about devs getting infected over ssh in less than an hour. Unless they had a comically weak root password or left VNC I don't believe it at all

> Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned.

Funny you said that. I migrated an old, Django web site to a slightly more modern architecture (docker compose with uvicorn instead of bare metal uWSGI) the other day, and while doing that I noticed that it doesn't need PostgreSQL at all. The old server had it already installed, so it was the lazy choice.

I just dumped all data and loaded it into an SQLite database with WAL and it's much easier to maintain and back up now.

Sqlite + Litestream for backups.

Does WAL really offer multiple concurrent writers? I know little about DBs and I've done a couple of Google searches and people say it allows concurrent reads while a write is happening, but no concurrent writers?

Not everybody says so... So, can anyone explain what's the right way to think about WAL?

First step is to get ssh setup correctly, and second step is to enable a firewall to block incoming connections on everything except the key ports (ssh but on a different port/web/ssl). This immediately eliminates a swathe of issues!

> Also avoid their object store.

Curious as to why you say this. I’m using litestream to backup to Hetzner object storage, and it’s been working well so far.

I guess itt’s probably more expensive than just a storage box?

Not sure but I also don’t have to set up cron jobs and the like.

When creating a VPS on Hetzner, it lets you by default to configure the key auth only.