Re:Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server
by gregsadetsky on Wednesday October 22, 2025 @04:14AM
(#45666175)
Backups are only advanced in the context of our Postgres being "Good" enough (maybe our built-in Posgres could be called "Barely enough" but that sounds a bit lame) :-)
I fully agree with you though, it's table stakes (unintended pun!) for any prod deployment, just as read-only followers, etc. Our biggest, most important point, is that folks should be using real dbs hosted by people who know what they're doing. The risk/reward ratio is out of whack in terms of doing it yourself.
And finally, re Hetzner and latency, that's unfortunately a very good issue that we have encountered. The solution in one case was to use an EC2 machine in the same region as the Crunchy Bridge deployment (ie some db providers end up being explicit about which AWS region they run in - and obviously, using RDS is also an option!) It's definitely a consideration.
> disco provides a "good enough" Postgres addon.
> This addon is a great way to quickly setup a database when Postgres is not mission critical to your system. If you need any non-basic features, like replication, automatic failover, monitoring, automatic backups and restore, etc. you should consider using a managed Postgres provider, such as Neon or Supabase.
How come automatic backups is considered an “advanced” feature?
Also I can’t think of a single application since 2012 that I have worked on that did not have a secondary/follower instance deployed. Also suggesting Neon and friends is fine, but I wonder what is your average latency, Hetzner does not have direct connection to the DCs these databases are hosted.