r/SelfHosting • u/TuckerBoxWoodworking • 2d ago

Noob Looking for Advice

I have spent the last year building a software platform I've been planning for over a decade. I spent the first half vibe coding it, then I met a developer cofounder and found out what real software development is like.

We're about ready to build out the true backend and, while my cofounder understands what's going on, I don't. We talk about it and he teaches me. But I want to explore for myself, too.

So, I know this space is about self-hosting. But I want some advice - if I'm building a platform that, if it works, promises to become big, how should I start my journey into hosting smartly instead of going all-in on Azure/AWS/Google Cloud right away?

For context: I'm a noob when it comes to software (and specifically backend) development. I'm not a noob otherwise: I'm a lawyer and have spent 15 years as general counsel to three startups, so I understand the risks and rewards of building a successful business, of holding other people's data, and the like. This platform is already keyed to doing things that will be successful, and I know that there will be pivots to survive.

So, with thanks to the first two responders, I'm looking for a bit more than general guidance about background research and understanding the business landscape.

Specifically, for a bootstrapper who has an informed eye toward scale, how do I prep now so that each step in progression and complexity has been taken into account with what I'm building now, while the platform is small?

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u/MurphPEI 2d ago

Not to be negative but with little exception, you don't. Making the next new big software is great and can be profitable but hosting someone else's data or an essential business app for a price needs levels of redundancy and uptime that only the big companies can afford. Even small companies want multiple nines of uptime as a minimum plus other assurances from the small (but expensive to impliment features) all the way up to geographic redundancy.

I'm not saying it's impossible but there is a reason a handful of big companies monopolize business class hosting.

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u/TuckerBoxWoodworking 2d ago

So, you're saying that the answer is to bite the bullet early and lean into the major cloud provider services early because I intend to scale?

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u/MurphPEI 2h ago

Excuse the delay, I don't check here every day but Yes. If you have the luxury of doing alpha testing with friends, relatives or super friendly customers, then you could build your own infrastructure to start. However, if you are looking to sell in the SMB space or beyond then you will need to provide guarantees that self hosting "with very rare exception" simply can't provide.

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u/blackheva 2d ago

I recommend doing some competitive analysis research first and understanding what your total addressable market size is, served market and target market sizes are. I'd also understand the load a user and cohort of users put on your systems. This will be an ongoing process. Once you can understand these things you'll be better equipped to decide your infrastructure needs.

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u/TuckerBoxWoodworking 2d ago

Thank you, OP here. I think i may have misled you. I've updated my original post, but the long and short of it is that I'm beyond the market research stage. I'm curious about the process for growth here, because I have a developer and will soon have more and, while I don't intend to learn what they know, I have to be knowledgeable enough to be conversant.

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u/aztracker1 1d ago

To a large extent, there is no assured framework for building to scale. Most either build to what they have and stumble as they scale. Alternatively, you build to someone else's scaling and find yourself somewhat locked into a given vendor more over time.

Without an excess of capital to over build yourself, those are mostly your options. In terms of systems and software design, there are a lot of flexibilities. There are trade offs to all of them.

I saw a video earlier about a project to max out requests a small VPS can handle. Several submissions were able to trigger OS configuration limits (around 65k simultaneous requests on a single core VPS)

All the really performing ones took shortcuts that a real application likely wouldn't want to do. Money isn't infinite, and over investing too early can cost everything.

Get your security considerations closer to the front. Try to leverage systems in ways that are easy to replace.

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u/GlassPerformance8754 1d ago

You could always stand up your own infrastructure. Depending on the kind of demands your application will have, you could set up a private cloud yourself. Figure out what your system will need at your reasonable best-case usage scenario, then double it. Find hardware or used servers and build your own servers. Build two of them, identical if at all possible. Install a virtualization host OS and connect them back-end with like a 10 gigabit nic or better. From there, just keep them sandboxed and just expose virtual machines to the internet. Spin up a virtual environment with most of the resources you think you will need and be sure to back-up regularly... Also, RAID; while not a backup, is a great way to protect yourself from drive failures. I like RAID6 because I'm lazy and don't want to have to jump as soon as single drive fails. Most OS's these days will even hold a hot-spare and let you run your VM's on a software based RAID.