Like all good things in infrastructure, picking whether or not to self-host your database is full of trade-offs. On the one hand, you have the absolute freedom to do whatever it is you want with your database - whether it's adding a useful Postgres extension, or experimenting with new technologies. On the other hand, you now have to dedicate resources to keeping your database reliably online.
In case you missed it, for about 15 minutes on June 8, 2021, Fastly's CDN had an outage, taking some of the internet's largest websites down (including the BBC, UK government, Reddit, and the New York Times - Amazon.com also had its CSS fail to load).
No matter where you live, if your business targets a global audience, the question of where to host your website comes up pretty often.
In case you don't remember, or missed my first article: OnlineOrNot started as a SaaS I built and shipped a v0.0.1 of in 7 days. It was an Absolute Minimal Viable Product. You couldn't even login with a password. Still can't, actually. You're probably wondering what it does. OnlineOrNot is a website monitoring service that provides both uptime, and page speed checks.
Chances are, you've run a PageSpeed Insights test and noticed "First Contentful Paint" as one of the first numbers in the report. I've covered most of the metrics before in my article on Understanding the Page Speed Metrics in Google Lighthouse, but in this article I wanted to dive deeply into First Contentful Paint - particularly what it is, what a good score is, and how to improve. Table of Contents.
You might be looking around for a new web host, or trying to get a better deal. You notice VPS plans are incredibly cheap - as low as $3-5 per month, while the cheapest shared hosting is around $10 per month. You wonder, "How is this possible?!" - especially when people recommend moving to a VPS once a site becomes popular. Let's discuss what these are first, before going into why cheaper doesn't necessarily mean better for you and your business.
If your experience is anything like mine, you're probably pretty confused about all the acronyms involved in checking your page speed. Chances are you probably also want to know which metrics matter, and if your score is good or bad. Table of Contents.
Page Speed is a pretty big deal these days. As of May 2021, Google will start combining Core Web Vitals (how Google measures page speed) with other UX-related signals to rank your page. In other words, Page Speed impacts your SEO. Since Google changed Googlebot's algorithm to highly favour fast, mobile-friendly websites, it has become more important to have a fast website.
When you're a single person running a system with thousands of users or more, it can be pretty daunting to think about going on holiday, or even relaxing for a weekend. "What if it goes down, and I'm not there to fix it?!" you ask yourself. While you can never really guarantee that nothing will go wrong, you can take some steps to minimise your risk of things going wrong.
If you've ever had to be on the receiving end of a monitoring system that uses email for alerts, you know how noisy things can get. Particularly if you're working in an agency or freelance-like environment, with dozens of client sites to maintain. You get so many emails that you start looking into integrations with third-party services like Zapier, and coming up with more and more complex rules to try reduce the noise.
