I often see Ask HN threads discussing how people are deploying their apps, specifically solo founders.[^1][^2] Solutions range from Heroku to AWS to niche products or even rolling your own VPS, each with their own set of tradeoffs. I'm not alone in seeing that web development is complex.[^3] What complexities are absolutely required? What complexities are worth it? What complexities are worth paying for a solution to, and how much are they worth?
The job I had just left was making good money running off of a single VPS. Some prolific solo indie hackers have shared their minimal hosting and deployment solutions that brought them to what many would define as success. Removing distributed systems and per-app/per-database/per-X costs is a huge weight off of a creative and experimental solo founders shoulders.
But even on a single VPS there are so many decisions to make and so much to configure. Non-root SSH access, network layer firewall, independently scalable block storage, automatic software updates, deduplicated incremental encrypted off-site backups are the absolute bare minimum standards I hold for customer facing applications and I can only hope the same of others. You probably want SSL/TLS certificates with HTTP/HTTPS and naked/www redirects. Where do you store local data? That's included in your backups, right? What about file permissions?
Acrobox provides guidance and structure to all of this. Not all complexity can be removed, but I've done my best to minimize complexities and maximize freedoms, carving a new niche in this space.
I value your constructive feedback. I'm here to answer questions or find my email on my website if you prefer.
Thanks,
Phil
P.S. I wrote more in depth about the history on my blog.[^4]
[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838132
[^2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16472887