by Marty Thomas
Jun 13 '16
You start with an idea, and want to build something cool. If you’re bootstrapping (or smart), then you’ll want to scale with your startup – letting your paying users foot the bill. You can start out paying next to nothing – in our case $10/year – and prove the concept. From there, you can scale up, along with your users. Here’s how we’ve done it with Tend so far…
We started with a shared server with one of my existing hosting accounts. Working through a cPanel, we created the database, purchased the domain through GoDaddy, and off we went “selling” the product. Total Cost: $10/year
Several months later, as we started to gain some users (mostly through our personal networks), Tend started to demand more resources. We moved everything to a 1GB Rackspace cloud server. We hosted the database on that same server. Total Cost $100/mo
A few months after that, our database started to outgrow the server. So we moved the database to it’s own 1GB Rackspace Cloud Database instance. Total Cost: $180/mo
By this time, we had some paying users to help justify the expenses. Both the Rackspace server and database allowed us to scale as we needed incrementally. It seems liked every month or so we were forced to jump up to the next tier. We worked our way up to two 4GB Servers behind a load balancer, and a 16GB database instance. Total Cost: $800/mo
Eventually, Tend started to outgrow the Rackspace database instance, and it made financial sense to move it to a dedicated server. We went with a 32GB dedicated server to host the database, keeping our cloud servers in tact behind the load balancer. This is where we sit today. Total Cost: $1,200/mo
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