wrhn

RileyHilliard

Joined 14 years ago

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3
Submissions
15
Member since
Sep 14
At 13, I secretly drilled holes in my parents' wood floor to route a 56k modem line to my bedroom for late-night Age of Empires marathons. That same scrappy curiosity carried through 3 acquisitions, 9 years as a LinkedIn Staff Engineer building infrastructure for 1B+ users, and now fuels my side projects, like WorkHub.so.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Correct, residential internet. I mostly tried doing this to see if I could it to work, and this is just a side project so I'm not too concerned about it from a stability standpoint. I'd say the biggest thing I've learned from it that would make me not choose the selfhosted route again is mostly security. I have everything pretty well quarantined off on its own, but that's really the only thing that keeps me up at night.

If the project were more serious or had decent traction then I'd probably first move it to VPS and then start considering cloud options. That's actually been kinda the point of this though: keep it simple and cheap early and if it gets some traction then ramp up the infrastructure beyond being selfhosted, but in the meantime selfhosting it is so cheap: it can just run @ the cost of the power it uses, which the M1 uses very little power.

Comment · 1 year ago
We built WorkHub.so to solve a problem every remote worker knows too well: finding the perfect coffee shop or workspace. After years of trying to make Yelp and Google Maps work for this, we realized they weren’t designed with remote workers in mind. So, we created WorkHub.so—a community-driven platform to help you discover and share the best spots to work or study.

Here's how we built this and host it from a M1 Mac Mini https://lab.workhub.so/running-your-app-on-pocket-change/

Comment · 1 year ago
I havn't heard of Dorch, though it seems like the pricing model is usage based? Not necessarily a bad thing (those prices seem generally cheap as well), but it's the same problem: your costs are going to grow as you scale, even if that scale is small.

Part of the choice to self host was to see if we could, but also the costs remain mostly fixed till the hardware maxes out, which we actually see as a feature for this stage of this particular side project.

Comment · 1 year ago
I experimented with hosting a production app from a $250 used M1 Mac Mini instead of using cloud services. Here's what I've learned:

Performance:

- 1,500-2,000 QPS achieved for SSR and API endpoints during load tests - 50% max CPU utilization hit during viral traffic (350k reddit post views/48h) - System Specs: M1 Mini w/ 8GB RAM, running headless Linux

Tech Stack:

- Docker containers optimized for ARM - Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel for connecting to the public internet - Grafana/Prometheus/Loki for monitoring - PostGIS for geographical queries - Custom ARM64 PostGIS image

Monthly Costs Comparison:

Cloud Hosting:

- Compute: $20-30/month - Database: $15-20/month - Storage: $5-10/month - Total: $40-60+/month

Self-Hosted M1 Mini:

- Hardware: $250 (one-time) - Electricity: $1-4/month - Total Reoccurring Costs: ~$2/month

Key Challenges:

- ARM compatibility for PostGIS (built custom image) - Monitoring implementation (self-hosted Grafana stack) - Third-party API costs during traffic spikes - Single point of failure (power outage took us down for a couple hours)

The setup handles our current scale well, with room for optimization. Containerized architecture means cloud migration is straightforward if/when needed. Happy to share implementation details or answer questions about any aspect of the setup. Full technical details: https://lab.workhub.so/running-your-app-on-pocket-change

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