Twilio charges less than a cent for each message. A hundred messages is 79c. I’d be surprised to find any other solution that is dramatically cheaper. On AWS it would be 58c.
Those prices are in US, but I would be surprised if those services weren’t competitive in other markets.
No mention on orgmode?
There’s nothing really private about your ip. Whatever you need to do to secure your network you have to do in any solution for this problem.
If you had monitoring, you wouldn’t have taken 6 hours to catch it.
I’d say learn HA anyway because it’s a good skill, but that doesn’t prevent you from having the other parts I mentioned. I say this because, again, unless you are experienced with HA, there will be edge cases where it’s not going to do what you though it would do, and your service will be down all the same. Monitoring/alerting and one-click/shell script install will be much more valuable in the short-mid term.
For me the main selling point of docker is spinning up a stable version of a container and it pulls all its dependencies which are also working. Installing things directly on the OS, at least for me, is a war of “run service; lib XX not found; apt install XX; run service; can’t write to /foo/bar;” etc etc
In your case, I’d have a docker compose with all my services, and would just say docker compose up and pronto.
HA involves many factors: service uptime, link uptime, db uptime, etc. I’d probably put a reverse proxy in front and use the servers as upstream. web servers tend to be more reliable, so in your case a single instance ought to suffice.
Aside from actual HA tools, your most important asset in this stage is a uptime check service that pings your server every n seconds, a reliable backup/restore procedure, and a one-button deployment strategy.
Shits can and will probably happen. What are you going to do when it does? And how fast can you respond? I say this because you most likely won’t get HA right in the first, second, or third time, unless you already have tons of experience behind you. Embrace failure and plan accordingly.
Your main dividing factor in this regard is if you want to do transcoding or not. If so, you need to pick a CPU with good iGPU, and for Intel that starts on the 8th gen. Older gens work well for 1080p, but for 4k they aren’t great. I have a i5-7500 that couldn’t do 4k HEVC without lag (although I was using it as HTPC. Maybe headless would be enough?)
For anything else, mostly any computer will do. Most of the stuff you host will be idle most of the time, so your CPU only needs to be powerful enough for the apps you are using at the moment.
Can’t you setup a new array with your new 3 drives, copy the data over, then expand your array with your old drives? IIRC zfs added support for expanding pools last year or so?
If you want to use a cloud provider, then your main problem will be uploading this much data and then downloading it back again, both price and time wise.
An easier solution is in fact copying the data over to another storage. Maybe borrow some pendrives from friends/family?
You might have better luck posting in hardware related subs. Maybe homelab?
You can buy a PCIe riser for your NIC. This could be a solution for the GPU taking a lot of space. Naturally you still need a slot on the case to attach the NIC to, but at least you will be able to put it into a PCIe slot.
It’s fine to have high CPU usage when something is actually running. I meant that it’s not normal to have background tasks (open programs that aren’t actively being used) consistently consuming too much CPU. 0~5% would be healthy. Maybe even 10%. Most definitely not 75%+.
It’s not normal for a computer to be using 99% CPU with background tasks only. I’d format and reisntall windows. If that doesn’t work, there’s a chance there’s a rootkit infection. In that case, the laptop is a no-go for anything.
In any case, as others have pointed out, I don’t see a lot of benefit of hanging with this laptop if you already have other computers. Unless you want to retire those devices and use the laptop only?
DO have more managed services, though. So it’s a balance between convenience and raw price. I’d say that for somebody starting solo, DO (and other PaaS) might be worth the premium
Sometimes it’s better to pay somebody to solve a problem for you. It’s a bit expensive, but your main DB failing is way more expensive. Once you have 5k daily users, hopefully you will have some revenue to make you worry about other problems.
In general, infra costs are the least of your concerns while growing revenue.
Wouldn’t we all be very pleased with 5k daily users? Lol
You will be fine. Any VPS/cloud will work for the database don’t forget your backups. In fact, this is where you should invest a bit more and have a managed database solution, so you can scale up if needed, unless you are very savvy with db administration
Airtable, notion, or any of the open source clones. Personally I don’t like any of the popular clones, but I’m picky.
I suppose wildcard DNS would not work for you?
I have a *.svr.domain.tld on Google Domains (need to transfer somewhere else), and then on Caddyfile I can register individual foo.svr.domain.tld without touching DNS
Any recent PC will do. Naturally, if you plan on playing games on it (moonlight and sunshine) you should size appropriately, and I’d recommend not to mix your NAS with a gaming PC since games and accessory can crash your server.
Without gaming, any 8th generation Intel or newer with iGPU should handle most transcoding needs. It’s more than capable of handling all the services you mentioned (again, not considering gaming)
I’d look into mobile class cpu so it’s lighter on energy consumption.