8 ms·

Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups. I've currently g

Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups. I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB). Additionally, my web app is a Kotlin API and a Nuxt.js SSR server, so I think I'd have to set it up as two separate "apps" on this platform. That means I'd be going from $5/mo to $25/mo. On one hand, that's not a ton in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the whole reason I use DigitalOcean and self manage my infrastructure is to _not_ have to pay that kind of money for my projects with no revenue.

asim 6y ago
I think you're stating the reasons already. There are people who don't want to self manage. They want a fully managed solution and don't want to think about the ops.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Sodman 6y ago
This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself, but for just $10 / mo (5->15) you don't have to worry about it. That's really what they're selling. $120 / year for peace of mind that your production DB is backed up is well worth it for a lot of people, especially if the alternative is potentially a bug in a homegrown shell script which could silently fail catastrophically and lose your whole DB.
- simplify 6y ago
  > This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself It doesn't sound like that argument. He compared it to Heroku's offerings, which are $0-9.
- afroboy 6y ago
  Didn't know rsync has free cloud storage.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
If you're going to do this yourself, Caprover is the best. Cram it into that $5/month, bump the swap to 2GB and then deploy your DB into it... backups are supported if you just straight up map a persistent volume out to your B2 (https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410 https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410) Edit: Be aware during automated upgrades you will trip CPU alarms.
- hyeomans 6y ago
  This is great, do you have any recommendations/comments on usage? Aside from the CPU one
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    I've used Caprover coming from Flynn and it's much better. It's not super pretty like Heroku but it works. Recommend adding NetData integration so you can monitor your hardware without logging into instances.
bastawhiz 6y ago
In my experience, the Heroku $9/mo plan isn't usable for anything production-ready. I had to upgrade to the next tier when I crossed about 100 active users. For $9/mo, you're also getting a pretty prohibitive row limit and a really low connection limit. DO's $7/mo dev database is more in line with Heroku's dev offering.
- pier25 6y ago
  OTOH the PG Standard 0 (4GB RAM, 64GB storage) of Heroku costs $50: https://www.heroku.com/pricing#data-services https://www.heroku.com/pricing#data-services On Digital Ocean the first offering with 4GB of RAM costs $60 and it only has 38GB of storage: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases
- brylie 6y ago
  From what I can tell, the cheapest managed database on DigitalOcean is $15/month, as was mentioned previously in this thread. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases
developer2 6y ago
Yes: it's just you; or at least, you're in the minority. You're from the same pool of people I last saw harassing employees over at Linode when they started matching DigitalOcean with the offering of $5/month VMs. Within just a few days, there were forum posts complaining that $5/month was still too expensive compared to the previous $10/month minimum, and that the cheapest VM should be $2/month. What you're asking for barely pays for the electricity to run a server, let alone covering even 1% of a single employee's salary (out of hundreds or thousands of employees), or the company's many other expenses. I'm tired of people bashing on hosting providers. They provide services which take many thousands of man-hours to plan, engineer, and develop at insane scale and high availability. They only charge what are already bottom-of-the-barrel prices; yet the only thing users can do is complain about $5 or $15 a month for professional services that, by the way, none of these complainers could ever "do better/cheaper on their own" (a common–and fictitious–criticism).
jonfriesen 6y ago
A small note, the DigitalOcean dev DBs do have daily backups though these are not accessible by the user and only come into play when there is a non-recoverable issue with the node they are on.
biztos 6y ago
I've given some thought to the PG offering -- $15/mo is really just for a dev instance with some minimal backup, it costs more to do anything production-level. My conclusion -- YMMV! -- is that I'd happily pay that much to "set and forget" the DB in a proof-of-concept or hobby context. I realize it's not perfect, and there are cheaper options, but I really think they gave us a cheap-enough deal, and you can always play sysadmin if it's too much for you. I'm not a big DO customer but I appreciate their pricing transparency: having worked professionally with 2/3 of the major Cloud companies I would never put anything there that's billed to my own account.

asim 6y ago

I think you're stating the reasons already. There are people who don't want to self manage. They want a fully managed solution and don't want to think about the ops.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Sodman 6y ago

This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself, but for just $10 / mo (5->15) you don't have to worry about it. That's really what they're selling. $120 / year for peace of mind that your production DB is backed up is well worth it for a lot of people, especially if the alternative is potentially a bug in a homegrown shell script which could silently fail catastrophically and lose your whole DB.

simplify 6y ago
> This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself It doesn't sound like that argument. He compared it to Heroku's offerings, which are $0-9.
afroboy 6y ago
Didn't know rsync has free cloud storage.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

If you're going to do this yourself, Caprover is the best. Cram it into that $5/month, bump the swap to 2GB and then deploy your DB into it... backups are supported if you just straight up map a persistent volume out to your B2 (https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410 https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410) Edit: Be aware during automated upgrades you will trip CPU alarms.

hyeomans 6y ago
This is great, do you have any recommendations/comments on usage? Aside from the CPU one
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  I've used Caprover coming from Flynn and it's much better. It's not super pretty like Heroku but it works. Recommend adding NetData integration so you can monitor your hardware without logging into instances.

bastawhiz 6y ago

In my experience, the Heroku $9/mo plan isn't usable for anything production-ready. I had to upgrade to the next tier when I crossed about 100 active users. For $9/mo, you're also getting a pretty prohibitive row limit and a really low connection limit. DO's $7/mo dev database is more in line with Heroku's dev offering.

pier25 6y ago
OTOH the PG Standard 0 (4GB RAM, 64GB storage) of Heroku costs $50: https://www.heroku.com/pricing#data-services https://www.heroku.com/pricing#data-services On Digital Ocean the first offering with 4GB of RAM costs $60 and it only has 38GB of storage: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases
brylie 6y ago
From what I can tell, the cheapest managed database on DigitalOcean is $15/month, as was mentioned previously in this thread. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases

developer2 6y ago

Yes: it's just you; or at least, you're in the minority. You're from the same pool of people I last saw harassing employees over at Linode when they started matching DigitalOcean with the offering of $5/month VMs. Within just a few days, there were forum posts complaining that $5/month was still too expensive compared to the previous $10/month minimum, and that the cheapest VM should be $2/month. What you're asking for barely pays for the electricity to run a server, let alone covering even 1% of a single employee's salary (out of hundreds or thousands of employees), or the company's many other expenses. I'm tired of people bashing on hosting providers. They provide services which take many thousands of man-hours to plan, engineer, and develop at insane scale and high availability. They only charge what are already bottom-of-the-barrel prices; yet the only thing users can do is complain about $5 or $15 a month for professional services that, by the way, none of these complainers could ever "do better/cheaper on their own" (a common–and fictitious–criticism).

jonfriesen 6y ago

A small note, the DigitalOcean dev DBs do have daily backups though these are not accessible by the user and only come into play when there is a non-recoverable issue with the node they are on.

biztos 6y ago

I've given some thought to the PG offering -- $15/mo is really just for a dev instance with some minimal backup, it costs more to do anything production-level. My conclusion -- YMMV! -- is that I'd happily pay that much to "set and forget" the DB in a proof-of-concept or hobby context. I realize it's not perfect, and there are cheaper options, but I really think they gave us a cheap-enough deal, and you can always play sysadmin if it's too much for you. I'm not a big DO customer but I appreciate their pricing transparency: having worked professionally with 2/3 of the major Cloud companies I would never put anything there that's billed to my own account.