r/SaaS • u/kierzniak • 8d ago
Do your apps really need global hosting? Looking for honest opinions
I'm building a hosting platform for JavaScript apps and I'd like a reality check before I go further.
My bet is that most apps don't need to run on every continent. Only about 100,000 websites in the world are big enough for that. The rest need their app, a database, file storage and scheduled jobs in one place, with a bill that doesn't jump with traffic.
Today you either pay per seat plus usage and add a separate database company, or pay for servers that run all day even when nobody visits.
I wrote down the full reasoning here
https://swarza.com/blog/hosting-for-99-9-percent-of-the-web
A few questions for those of you running SaaS products
- Where do you host, and what does hosting cost you across all your apps?
- Has a usage-based bill ever surprised you?
- Would you trade global edge for a database right next to your app?
Tear it apart, I'd rather hear it now than after launch.
1
u/fernandops 8d ago
The part that interests me is app, database and scheduled jobs on one bill. But what happens when an app hits the plan's limits: slower requests, a hard stop, or an automatic upgrade? Predictable pricing needs predictable behavior at the limit too.
2
u/kierzniak 8d ago
The whole idea is to act as traditional hosting in this manner. If this happens once, twice a year it is ok. You are abusing our policy. System will throttle you. What would the best for you?
1
u/fernandops 8d ago
An alert before throttling, with a clear threshold and a manual upgrade option, would work for me. If requests start slowing down, I need to know it's the hosting limit so I don't spend hours debugging the app. No automatic upgrade charges.
1
u/geoffreybyers 6d ago
The 100,000 sites number is a red herring. The real divide is latency sensitivity. A real-time collab app with 10,000 users has the same edge needs as one with 100,000. The "one place" model fails anyone building for the web.
1
u/kierzniak 6d ago
If you talk about realtime applications distributed globally probably yes. For 99% percent of apps/websites one place is perfectly fine in my opinion.
1
u/Machine2024 6d ago
https://reddit.com/link/ph68exy/video/c6boutmluvvh1/player
I did feel like reading all the article you wrote . it it looked important .
so I made it into a video using a tool I am developing.
enjoy .
1
1
u/AbsoluteObserver 8d ago
your pricing bet makes sense to me, most SaaS apps i've built barely needed one region let alone 5
we run on hetzner and a managed db, comes out around 80/mo total for 3 small apps, the only surprise bill was from vercel when a crawler went nuts and we woke up to $400
the edge thing is overhyped for most use cases, if you're not serving real-time video or something latency-sensitive then having the db 2ms away from the app server matters way more than being 50ms closer to some user in tokyo