“I have no doubt in my mind that engineers at these hosting companies… are better than me. Those DevOps engineers, the people that update the servers, all of that stuff, they're better than me. And I'm not going to be able to compete with their level of knowledge. So we actually pay a premium for the most highly available services.”
The Bootstrapped Founder · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · May 2023
Context
Asked how Fathom keeps an always-on analytics service running on a bootstrapper's budget, Ellis says he chose premium managed services because he knows his limits, and treats paying for uptime as a competitive advantage.
Transcript
exactly. It's a big thing. It's an important
…to be done for me. But I'm still excited about this stuff. And you've been both in what your courses are doing and what you're constantly sharing on Twitter and just how good Fathom is as a product. I'm excited to know how do you keep this always running service on a budget? What's the tech behind
that? Yeah, that's a good question. And a lot of engineers will self-host things and they'll build it themselves and they'll manage it, do the updates, that sort of thing. From the beginning, I was very aware of my limitations and aware of what I wanted to spend my time on. I have no doubt in my mind that engineers at these hosting companies, like originally it was Heroku, now it's AWS and I think it's a mixture of things, but those engineers are better than me. Those DevOps engineers, whatever you call them, the people that update the servers, all of that stuff, they're better than me. And I'm not going to be able to compete with their level of knowledge. So we actually pay a premium for the most highly available services. So we…
I love that. That's my perspective too. Particularly as a small business, not building things that other companies have whole divisions for is just a smarter move. Like, remember when we built Feedback Panda, we had a similar choice. Like, we could host a database ourselves somewhere, right? Mongo…
You had some serious, serious traffic then. I mean, that's
we had a lot of data. I mean, you should know everything about a lot of data. I was going to ask you because our couple hundred gigabytes of text data probably pale in comparison to what you are working with on a daily basis. But you know, it was just a managed service that was quite expensive, but…
More from The Bootstrapped Founder
