Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?
I am a solo founder of a website monitoring SaaS [0]. Theoretically, my uptime should be higher than that of my customers'. Here are a few things that I found helpful in the course of running my business:<p>* Redundancy. If you process background jobs, have multiple workers listening on the same queues (preferably in different regions or availability zones). Run multiple web servers and put them behind a load balancer. If you use AWS RDS or Heroku Postgres, use Multi-AZ deployment. Be mindful of your costs though, because they can skyrocket fast.<p>* Minimize moving parts (e.g. databases, servers, etc..). If possible, separate your marketing site from your web app. Prefer static sites over dynamic ones.<p>* Don't deploy at least 2 hours before you go to sleep (or leave your desk). 2 hours is usually enough to spot botched deploys.<p>* Try to use managed services as much as possible. As a solo founder, you probably have better things to focus on. As I mentioned before, keep an eye on your costs.<p>* Write unit/integration/system tests. Have a good coverage, but don't beat yourself up for not having 100%.<p>* Monitor your infrastructure and set up alerts. Whenever my logs match a predefined regex  pattern (e.g "fatal" OR "exception" OR "error"), I get notified immediately. To be sure that alerts reach you, route them to multiple channels (e.g. email, SMS, Slack, etc..). Obviously, I'm biased here.<p>I'm not gonna lie, these things make me anxious, even to this day (it used to be worse). I take my laptop everywhere I go and make sure that my phone is always charged.<p>[0] <a href="https://tryhexadecimal.com" rel="nofollow">https://tryhexadecimal.com</a>