Ask HN: How to architect the back end for my side project (Family Movie DB)? Working on a side project: Family Movie DB (familymoviedb.com) Currently it's a simple static site (built with Astro) served via Cloudflare Pages. The next phase of the project is to add user accounts to support the following: - Staring a movie - Marking a movie as "watched" - Creating movie lists - Customizing the weights used for the site's scoring algo (the "FMDb score") (because some families value X more than Y and are more concerned with A than B, etc, etc) - Access member-only content (e.g. as movie discussion guides) - Probably more things, that's just the initial thinking From the beginning my thinking was to use the dynamic rendering abilities of Astro via Cloudflare Pages' "Functions" (Workers) to handle this and use something like Cloudflare's D1 or Turso for the database. However, this means that 100% (or at least nearly 100%) of the pages will invoke a Workers function call. Since Cloudflare's pricing seems super cheap I wasn't concerned about this. However, after the recent Cloudflare drama, the idea of lowering my platform risk seems like a very good idea. Context: - Generally hate complexity - Bulk of my experience is on the frontend - Try to keep costs to an absolute minimum - This is one of several projects in the works... would like an approach i could extend to other projects - Have managed VPSes before... both love and hate the idea of doing it again - Generally love the concept of something like Convex but am concerned about platform risk (yes, i know it can be self hosted, but this seems like more of an "in theory" type of thing than practical fallback option) Options i see: - Self host on a VPS (maybe using something like PocketBase or CapRover)? - Keep using Cloudflare, but only for the DNS and hosting via Pages), with the idea that I could relatively easily switch this to something like Vercel or Netlify in the future if need be? - Use something like Vercel or Netlify instead? - Use Convex (https://www.convex.dev/) (would still need to host the site somewhere but i think this would cover all backend needs, current and future, without scaling concerns)? - Other? Please help me decide! |