I did this (well, a large-r VPS for $120/month) for my Rails-based sports streaming website. I had a significant amount of throughput too, especially at peak (6-10pm ET).
My biggest takeaway was to have my core database tables (user, subscription, etc) backed up every 10 minutes, and the rest every hour, and test their restoration. (When I shut down the site it was 1.2TB.) Having a script to quickly provision a new node—in case I ever needed it—would have something up within 8 minutes from hitting enter.
When I compare this to the startups I’ve consulted for, who choose k8s because it’s what Google uses yet they only push out 1000s of database queries per day with a handful of background jobs and still try to optimize burn, I shake my head.
I’d do it again. Like many of us I don’t have the need for higher-complexity setups. When I did need to scale, I just added more vCPUs and RAM.
My biggest takeaway was to have my core database tables (user, subscription, etc) backed up every 10 minutes, and the rest every hour, and test their restoration. (When I shut down the site it was 1.2TB.) Having a script to quickly provision a new node—in case I ever needed it—would have something up within 8 minutes from hitting enter.
When I compare this to the startups I’ve consulted for, who choose k8s because it’s what Google uses yet they only push out 1000s of database queries per day with a handful of background jobs and still try to optimize burn, I shake my head.
I’d do it again. Like many of us I don’t have the need for higher-complexity setups. When I did need to scale, I just added more vCPUs and RAM.