Creatives and businesses depend on programmers to fulfil their visions. The problem? Programmers are scarce. There are 230,000 unfilled jobs for programmers in the U.S. alone, and more than 90 percent of the gap is outside Silicon Valley. And, when the vast majority of the world’s great software talent resides in the halls of tech juggernauts — like Google, Amazon and Facebook — giving them an embarrassment of riches, the rest of the world is left behind.

In this article I will look at the current hosting setup of healthchecks.io, how it has evolved during the past two years, and what challenges I faced running this small but lively service.