Hacker News

Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS. It's amazing and it works perfectly fine.

For client projects, however, I always try and sell them on paying the AWS fees, simply because it shifts the responsibility of the hardware being "up" to someone else. It does not inherently solve the downtime problem, but it allows me to say, "we'll have to wait until they've sorted this out, Ikea and Disney are down, too."

Doesn't always work like that and isn't always a tried-and-true excuse, but generally lets me sleep much better at night.

With limited budgets, however, it's hard to accept the cost of RDS (and we're talking with at least one staging environment) when comparing it to a very tight 3-node Galera cluster running on Hetzner at barely a couple of bucks a month.

Or Cloudflare, titan at the front, being down again today and the past two days (intermittently) after also being down a few weeks ago and earlier this year as well. Also had SQS queues time out several times this week, they picked up again shortly, but it's not like those things ...never happen on managed environments. They happen quite a bit.

> I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme:

> If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly with vibe coding, it's easier to treat Postgres as just another remote API that you can call from your single deployed app

> If you're a really big company and are reaching the scale where you need trained database engineers to just work on your stack, you might get economies of scale by just outsourcing that work to a cloud company that has guaranteed talent in that area. The second full freight salaries come into play, outsourcing looks a bit cheaper.

This is funny. I'd argue the exact opposite. I would self host only:

* if I were on a tight budget and trading an hour or two of my time for a cost saving of a hundred dollars or so is a good deal; or

* at a company that has reached the scale where employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing.

I have nothing against self-hosting PostgreSQL. Do whatever you prefer. But to me outsourcing this to cloud providers seems entirely reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses. According to the author's article, self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month (after setup, and if you already know what to do). It's easy to do the math...

So, yeah, I guess there's much confusion about what a 'managed database' actually is? Because for me, the table stakes are:

-Backups: the provider will push a full generic disaster-recovery backup of my database to an off-provider location at least daily, without the need for a maintenance window

-Optimization: index maintenance and storage optimization are performed automatically and transparently

-Multi-datacenter failover: my database will remain available even if part(s) of my provider are down, with a minimal data loss window (like, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, depending on SLA and thus plan expenditure)

-Point-in-time backups are performed at an SLA-defined granularity and with a similar retention window, allowing me to access snapshots via a custom DSN, not affecting production access or performance in any way

-Slow-query analysis: notifying me of relevant performance bottlenecks before they bring down production

-Storage analysis: my plan allows for #GB of fast storage, #TB of slow storage: let me know when I'm forecast to run out of either in the next 3 billing cycles or so

Because, well, if anyone provides all of that for a monthly fee, the whole "self-hosting" argument goes out of the window quickly, right? And I say that as someone who absolutely adores self-hosting...

The author brings up the point, but I have always found surprising how much more expensive managed databases are than a comparable VPS.

I would expect a little bit more as a cost of the convenience, but in my experience it's generally multiple times the expense. It's wild.

This has kept me away from managed databases in all but my largest projects.

I still don't get how folks can hype Postgres with every second post on HN, yet there is no simple batteries-included way to run a HA Postgres cluster with automatic failover like you can do with MongoDB. I'm genuinely curious how people deal with this in production when they're self-hosting.

Take a look at https://github.com/vitabaks/autobase

In case you want to self host but also have something that takes care of all that extra work for you

I don't feel like it's easy to self-host postgres.

Here are my gripes:

1. Backups are super-important. Losing production data just is not an option. Postgres offers pgdump which is not appropriate tool, so you should set up WAL archiving or something like that. This is complicated to do right.

2. Horizontal scalability with read replicas is hard to implement.

3. Tuning various postgres parameters is not a trivial task.

4. Upgrading major version is complicated.

5. You probably need to use something like pgbouncer.

6. Database usually is the most important piece of infrastructure. So it's especially painful when it fails.

I guess it's not that hard when you did it once and have all scripts and memory to look back. But otherwise it's hard. Clicking few buttons in hoster panel is much easier.

I started in this industry before cloud was a thing. I did most of the things RDS does the hard way (except being able to dynamically increase memory on a running instance, that's magic to me). I do not want that responsibility, especially because I know how badly it turns out when it's one of a dozen (or dozens) of responsibilities asked of the team.

What irks me about so many comments in this thread is that they often totally ignore questions of scale, the shape of your workloads, staffing concerns, time constraints, stage of your business, whether you require extensions, etc.

There is a whole raft of reasons why you might be a candidate for self-hosting, and a whole raft of reasons why not. This article is deeply reductive, and so are many of the comments.

I'm probably just an idiot, but I ran unmanaged postgres on Fly.io, which is basically self hosting on a vm, and it wasn't fun.

I did this for just under two years, and I've lost count of how many times one or more of the nodes went down and I had to manually deregister it from the cluster with repmgr, clone a new vm and promote a healthy node to primary. I ended up writing an internal wiki page with the steps. I never got it: if one of the purposes of clusters is having higher availability, why did repmgr not handle zombie primaries?

Again, I'm probably just an idiot out of my depth with this. And I probably didn't need a cluster anyway, although with the nodes failing like they did, I didn't feel comfortable moving to a single node setup as well.

I eventually switched to managed postgres, and it's amazing being able to file a sev1 for someone else to handle when things go down, instead of the responsibility being on me.

since this is on the front page (again?) I guess I'll chime in: learn kubernetes - it's worth it. It did take me 3 attempts at it to finally wrap my head around it I really suggest trying out many different things and see what works for you.

And I really recommend starting with *default* k3s, do not look at any alternatives to cni, csi, networked storage - treat your first cluster as something that can spontaniously fail and don't bother keeping it clean learn as much as you can.

Once you have that, you can use great open-source k8s native controllers which take care of vast majority of requirements when it comes to self-hosting and save more time in the long run than it took to set up and learn these things.

Honerable mentions: k9s, lens(I do not suggest using it in the long-term, but UI is really good as a starting point), rancher webui.

PostgreSQL specifically: https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg If you really want networked storage: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn

I do not recommend ceph unless you are okay with not using shared filesystems as they have a bunch of gotchas or if you want S3 without having to install a dedicated deployment for it.

Over time I've realized that the best abstraction for managing a computer is a computer.

I have ran (read: helped with infrastructure) a small production service using PSQL for 6 years, with up to hundreds of users per day. PSQL has been the problem exactly once, and it was because we ran out of disk space. Proper monitoring (duh) and a little VACUUM would have solved it.

Later I ran a v2 of that service on k8s. The architecture also changed a lot, hosting many smaller servers sharing the same psql server(Not really microservice-related, think more "collective of smaller services ran by different people"). I have hit some issues relating to maxing out the max connections, but that's about it.

This is something I do on my free time so SLA isn't an issue, meaning I've had the ability to learn the ropes of running PSQL without many bad consequences. I'm really happy I have had this opportunity.

My conclusion is that running PSQL is totally fine if you just set up proper monitoring. If you are an engineer that works with infrastructure, even just because nobody else can/wants to, hosting PSQL is probably fine for you. Just RTFM.

And if you want a supabase-like functionality, I'm a huge fan of PostgREST (which is actually how supabase works/worked under the hood). Make a view for your application and boom, you have a GET only REST API. Add a plpgsql function, and now you can POST. It uses JWT for auth, but usually I have application on the same VLAN as DB so it's not as rife for abuse.

I've been self hosting it for 20 years. Best technical decision I ever made. Rock solid

> I sleep just fine at night thank you.

I also self-host my webapp for 4+ years. never have any trouble with databases.

pg_basebackup and wal archiving work wonder. and since I always pull the database (the backup version) for local development, the backup is constantly verified, too.

I would have liked to read about the "high availability" that's mentioned a couple of times in the article; the WAL Configuration section is not enough, and replication is expensive'ish.

I've had my hair on fire because my app code shit the bed. I've never ever (throughout 15 years of using it in everything I do) had to even think about Postgres, and yes, I always set it up self-hosted. The only concern I've had is when I had to do migrations where I had to upgrade PG to fit with upgrades in the ORM database layer. Made for some interesting stepping-stone upgrades once in a while but mostly just careful sysadmining.

What do you postgres self hosters use for performance analysis? Both GCP-SQL and RDS have their performance analysis pieces of the hosted DB and it's incredible. Probably my favorite reason for using them.

I hosted PostgreSQL professionally for over a decade.

Overall, a good experience. Very stable service and when performance issues did periodically arise, I like that we had full access to all details to understand the root cause and tune details.

Nobody was employeed as a full-time DBA. We had plenty of other things going on in addition to running PostgreSQL.

From my point of view the real challenge comes when you want high availability and need to setup a Postgres cluster.

With MongoDB you simply create a replicaset and you are done.

When planing a Postgres cluster, you need to understand replication options, potentially deal with Patroni. Zalandos Docker Spilo image is not really maintained, the way to go seems CloudNativePG, but that requires k8s.

I still don’t understand why there is no easy built-in Postgres cluster solution.

> Self-hosting a database sounds terrifying.

Is this actually the "common" view (in this context)?

I've got decades with databases so I cannot even begin to fathom where such an attitude would develop, but, is it?

Boggling.

> If your database goes down at 3 AM, you need to fix it.

Of all the places I've worked that had the attitude "If this goes down at 3AM, we need to fix it immediately", there was only one where that was actually justifiable from a business perspective. I'm worked at plenty of places that had this attitude despite the fact that overnight traffic was minimal and nothing bad actually happened if a few clients had to wait until business hours for a fix.

I wonder if some of the preference for big-name cloud infrastructure comes from the fact that during an outage, employees can just say "AWS (or whatever) is having an outage, there's nothing we can do" vs. being expected to actually fix it

From this perspective, the ability to fix problems more quickly when self hosting could be considered an antifeature from the perspective of the employee getting woken up at 3am

I have been self hosting a product on Postgres that serves GIS applications for 20 years and that has been upgraded through all of the various versions during that time. It has a near perfect uptime record modulo two hardware failures and short maintenance periods for final upgrade cutovers. The application has real traffic - the database is bigger than those at my day job.

> Take AWS RDS. Under the hood, it's:

    Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks
    A custom backup system using EBS snapshots
    Automated configuration management via Chef/Puppet/Ansible
    Load balancers and connection pooling (PgBouncer)
    Monitoring integration with CloudWatch
    Automated failover scripting

The problem i find with RDS (and most other managed Postgres) is that they limit your options for how you want to design your database architecture. For instance, if write consistency is important to you want to support synchronous replication, there is no way to do this in RDS without either Aurora or having the readers in another AZ. The other issue is that you only have access to logical replication, because you don't have access to your WAL archive, so it makes moving off RDS much more difficult.

I'd argue forget about Postgres completely. If you can shell out $90/month, the only database you should use is GCP Spanner (yes, this also means forget about any mega cloud other than GCP unless you're fine paying ingress and egress).

And for small projects, SQLite, rqlite, or etcd.

My logic is either the project is important enough that data durability matters to you and sees enough scale that loss of data durability would be a major pain in the ass to fix, or the project is not very big and you can tolerate some lost committed transactions.

A consensus-replication-less non-embedded database has no place in 2025.

This is assuming you have relational needs. For non-relational just use the native NoSQL in your cloud, e.g. DynamoDB in AWS.

I've been self hosting Postgresql for 12+ years at this point. Directly on bare metal then and now in a container with CapRover.

I have a cron sh script to backup to S3 (used to be ftp).

It's not "business grade" but it has also actually NEVER failed. Well once, but I think it was more the container or a swarm thing. I just destroyed and recreated it and it picked up the same volume fine.

The biggest pain point is upgrading as Postgresql can't upgrade the data without the previous version installed or something. It's VERY annoying.

I think a big piece missing from these conversations is compliance frameworks and customer trust. Of your selling to enterprise customers or governments, they want to go through your stack, networking, security, audit logs, and access controls with a fine toothed comb.

Everything you do that isn't "normal" is another conversation you need to have with an auditor plus each customer. Those eat up a bunch of time and deals take longer to close.

Right or wrong, these decisions make you less "serious" and therefore less credible in the eyes of many enterprise customers. You can get around that perception, but it takes work. Not hosting on one of the big 3 needs to be decided with that cost in mind

I think we can get to the point where we have self-hosted agents that can manage db maintenance and recovery. There could be regular otel -> * -> Grafana -> ~PagerDuty -> you and TriageBot which would call specialists to gather state and orchestrate a response.

Scripts could kick off health reports and trigger operations. Upgrades and recovery runbooks would be clearly defined and integration tested.

It would empower personal sovereignty.

Someone should make this in the open. Maybe it already exists, there are a lot of interesting agentops projects.

If that worked 60% of the time and I had to figure out the rest, I’d self host that. I’d pay for 80%+.

Great read. I moved my video sharing app from GCP to self hosted on a beefy home server+ cloudflare for object storage and video streaming. Had been using Cloud SQL as my managed db and now running Postgres on my own dedicated hardware. I was forced to move away from the cloud primarily because of the high cost of running video processing(not because Cloud SQL was bad) but instead have discovered self hosting the db isnt as difficult as its made out to be. And there was a daily charge of keeping the DB hot which I dont have now. Will be moving to a rackmount server at a datacolo in about a month so this was great to read and confirms my experience.

Self-hosting Postgres is so incredibly easy. People are under this strange spell that they need to use an ORM or always reach for SQLite when it’s trivially easy to write raw SQL. The syntax was designed so lithium’d out secretaries were able to write queries on a punchcard. Postgres has so many nice lil features.

> Self-hosting a database sounds terrifying.

Is this really the state of our industry? Lol. Bunch of babies scared of the terminal.

I wish this article would have went more in-depth on how they're setting up backups. The great thing about sequel light is lightstream makes backup and restore something you don't really have to think about

Self-hosting is one of those things that makes sense when you can control all of the variables. For example, can you stop the developers from using obscure features of the db, that suddenly become deprecated, causing you to need to do a manual rolling back while they fix the code? A one-button UI to do that might be very handy. Can you stop your IT department from breaking the VPN, preventing you from logging into the db box at exactly the wrong time? Having it all in a UI that routes around IT's fat fingers might be helpful.

I have spent quite some time the past months and years to deploy Postgres databases to non-hyperscaler environments.

A popular choice for smaller workloads has always been the Hetzner cloud which I finally poured into a ready-to-use Terraform module https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/hetzner/rds/index....

Main focus here is a tested solution with automated backup and recovery, leaving out the complicated parts like clustering, prioritizing MTTR over MTBF.

The naming of RDS is a little bit presumptuous I know, but it works quite well :-)

For a fascinating counterpoint (gist: cloud hosted Postgres on RDS aurora is not anything like the system you would host yourself, and other cloud deployments of databases should also not be done like our field is used to doing it when self-hosting) see this other front page article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334990

I recently was also doing some research into what projects exist that come close to a “managed Postgres on Digital Ocean” experience, sadly there’s some building blocks but nothing that really makes it a complete no-brainer.

https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/what-i-wish-existed-for-se...

Enjoyed the article, and the "less can be more than you think" mindset in general.

To the author - on Android Chrome I seem to inevitably load the page scrolled to the bottom, footnotes area. Scrolling up, back button, click link again has the same results - I start out seeing footnotes. Might be worth a look.

I've had to set up postgres manually ( before docker TBF) and it's best described as suffering.

Things will go wrong. And it's all your fault. You can't just blame AWS.

Also are we changing the definition of self hosting. Self hosting on Digital Ocean ?!

Just don't try to build it from source haha. Compiling Postgres 18 with the PostGIS extension has been such a PITA because the topology component won't configure to not use the system /usr/bin/postgres and has given me a lot of grief. Finally got it fixed I think though.

Without disagreeing:

Sometimes it is nice to simplify the conversation with non-tech management. Oh, you want HA / DR / etc? We click a button and you get it (multi-AZ). Clicking the button doubles your DB costs from x to y. Please choose.

Then you have one less repeating conversation and someone to blame.

I didnt even know there were companies that would host postgres for you. I self host it for my personal projects with 0 users and it works just fine, so I don't know why anyone would do it any differently.

People really love jumping through hoops to avoid spending five dollars.

I moved from AWS RDS to ScaleWay RDS, had the same effect on cost

Disk read write performance is also orders of magnitude better/cheaper/faster.

Better yet, self host Postgres on your own open source PaaS with Coolify, Dokploy, or Canine, and then you can also self host all your apps on your VPS too. I use Dokploy but I'm looking into Canine, and I know many have used Coolify with great success.

Everyone and their mother wants to host Postgres for you!

Pros self-host their DB's

Now for the next step... just use SQLite (it's possible it will be enough for your case).

Disclaimer: there's no silver bullet, yadda yadda. But SQLite in WAL mode and backups using Litestream have worked perfectly for me.

Huh? Maybe I missed something, but...why should self-hosting a database server be hard or scary? Sure, you are then responsible for security backups, etc...but that's not really different in the cloud - if anything, the cloud makes it more complicated.

The author's experience is trivial, so it indicates nothing. Anybody can set up a rack of postgresql servers and say it's great in year 2. All the hardware is under warranty and it still works anyway. There haven't been any major releases. The platform software is still "LTS". Nobody has needed to renegotiate the datacenter lease yet. So experience in year 2 tells you nothing.

And then there is the urge to Postgres everything.

I was disappointed alloy doesn't support timescaledb as a metrics endpoint. Considering switching to telegraf just because I can store the metrics on Postgres.

> When self-hosting makes sense: 1. If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly [...]

This is when you use SQLite, not Postgres. Easy enough to turn into Postgres later, nothing to set up. It already works. And backups are literally just "it's a file, incremental backup by your daily backups already covers this".

Some fun math for you guys.

I had a single API endpoint performing ~178 Postgres SQL queries.

  Setup              Latency/query   Total time
  -------------------------------------------------
  Same geo area      35ms            6.2s
  Same local network 4ms             712ms
  Same server        ~0ms            170ms

I was on a severely restricted budget and self hosted everything for 15+ years, while the heavily used part of the database was on a RAM card. The RAM drive was soft raided to a hard drive pair which were 3Ware raid1 hdds, just in case, and also did a daily backup on the database and during that time never had any data loss and never had to restore anything from backup. And my options were severely restricted due to a capped income.

The real downside wasn't technical. The constant background anxiety you had to learn to live with, since the hosted news sites were hammered by the users. The dreaded SMS alerts saying the server was inaccessible (often due to ISP issues) or going abroad meant persuading one of your mates to keep an eye on things just in case, created a lot of unnecessary stress.

AWS is quite good. It has everything you need and removes most of that operational burden, so the angst is much lower, but the pricing is problematic.

(This is very reductionist)

A lot of this comes down to devs not understanding infrastructure and infrastructure components and the insane interplay and complexity. And they don't care! Apps, apps apps, developers, developers, developers!

On the managerial side, it's often about deflection of responsibility for the Big Boss.

It's not part of the app itself it can be HARD, and if you're not familiar with things, then it's also scary! What if you mess up?

(Most apps don't need the elasticity, or the bells and whistles, but you're paying for them even if you don't use them, indirectly.)

I wish this post went into the actual how! He glossed over the details. There is a link to his repo, which is a start I suppose: https://github.com/piercefreeman/autopg

A blog post that went into the details would be awesome. I know Postgres has some docs for this (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/backup.html), but it's too theoretical. I want to see a one-stop-shop with everything you'd reasonably need to know to self host: like monitoring uptime, backups, stuff like that.

I've operated both self-hosted and managed database clusters with complex topologies and mission-critical data at well-known tech companies.

Managed database services mostly automate a subset of routine operational work, things like backups, some configuration management, and software upgrades. But they don't remove the need for real database operations. You still have to validate restores, build and rehearse a disaster recovery plan, design and review schemas, review and optimize queries, tune indexes, and fine-tune configuration, among other essentials.

In one incident, AWS support couldn't determine what was wrong with an RDS cluster and advised us to "try restarting it".

Bottom line: even with managed databases, you still need people on the team who are strong in DBOps. You need standard operating procedures and automation, built by your team. Without that expertise, you're taking on serious risk, including potentially catastrophic failure modes.

Another thread where I can't determine whether the "it's easy" suggestions are from people who are clueless or expert.

honestly at this point I'm actually surprised that there aren't specialized linux distributions for hosting postgres. There's so many kernel-level and file-system level optimizations that can be done that significantly impact performance, and the ability to pare down all of the unneeded stuff in most distributions would make for a pretty compact and highly optimized image.

Recommends hosting postgres yourself. Doesn't recommend a distribution stack. If you try this at a startup to save $50 a month, you will never recoup the time you wasted setting it up. We pay dedicated managed services for these things so we can make products on top of them.