alt Hacker NewsThank you for this. I'm in Europe with an established SaaS that's been running in production for years and I've converged on a similar stack (OVHCloud instead of Hetzner). However, I've realized you can stay sovereign and independent in any jurisdiction (not just Europe) just by simplifying your stack and running a few baremetal servers in-house.
Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house with power supply backup and networking redundancy and you're good to go to serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers. You don't need VMs: a single Mac Studio gets you 2–4x the power of m7i.2xlarge on AWS, and pays for itself within a few months of AWS bills. You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs (an unofficial Apple partner). You get free S3-compatible object storage with zero ongoing storage costs with MinIO (yes it's redundant even if you lose a server, and your hosting provider can't hold your data hostage by charging for egress). Postgres runs like a beast and is incredibly easy to setup - you get zero latency DB because it runs on the same machine, has access to lots of RAM and you're not paying per-GB or per-core. Managed databases are a scam. You don't need an Auth provider, just do passkeys yourself. And the great thing about Apple Silicon hardware is that it is amazingly quiet, reliable, and efficient - you can do thing like run headless browsers 3x faster and cheaper than on standard server hardware because of the unified memory and GPU acceleration, so you're not paying for CI/CD compute by-the-minute or headless browsers either.
This entire stack could give you computing power equivalent to a 25k euro/month AWS bill for the cost of electricity (same electricity cost as running a few fridges 24/7) plus about 50k euros one-time to set it up (about 4 Mac Studios). And yes, it's redundant, scalable, and even faster (in terms of per-request latency) than standard AWS/GCP cloud bloat. Not only is it cheaper and you own everything, but your app will work faster because all services are local (DB, Redis cache, SSD, etc.) without any VM overhead, shared cores, or noisy neighbours.
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Thanks for the post. How do you currently deal with HD failures/redundancy? That’s my main concern leaving a managed database provider.
> Managed databases are a scam.
I, too, once believed this. Then I had the displeasure of watching a $10,000 server fail during Christmas travel (about 20 years ago now). A single RAID drive failed. Then, during the rebuild, a second drive failed. Then the RAID controller itself failed catastrophically, losing all the RAID volume metadata. When we restored from backup, we discovered that the sysadmin who had just quit a few weeks before had lied to us about the backup system, and we had no backups.
This is the sort of black swan event that happens every 5-10 years. It's an unusually bad event, even by black swan standards, but stuff like this happens.
The fundamental problem of self-hosted databases is that you test the happy path every day, but you only test true disaster recovery every 5-10 years. And in practice, this means that disaster recovery will usually fail.
With a managed database service, most of what you're paying goes to making sure that disaster recovery works. And in my experience, it does. I've seen RDS database servers fail catastrophically, and completely rebuild in under 15 minutes with virtually no data loss, with almost no human intervention at all.
If you care about your customers' data, I think that a reputable managed database is the right move until roughly the point that you can pay for a full time database administrator. At that point, sure, roll your own. But do regular disaster recovery tests, lest you discover that a recently departed DBA has been lying to you.
> You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs
Does it do distributed inference? What kinda token speeds do you get?
I have no idea how to setup something like this. How hard is to hire somebody competent enough to set a system like this in-house?
>However, I've realized you can stay sovereign and independent in any jurisdiction (not just Europe) just by simplifying your stack and running a few baremetal servers in-house.
Only if you have physical offices and staff in every jurisdiction you're serving.
How do you handle anti-DDOS, zero-trust and WAF duties to a cloudflare-esque equivalency (e.g. a reverse-proxy style setup)?
While I definitely concur with your conclusions re VMs and GCP hosting overhead, did you benchmark a container based setup in GKE or similar?
I have been self hosting since couple of years, yes I got very very interested in self hosting my apps, away from the cloud overlords, but the major issue is the network.
You'll need business internet plans with redundancy and based on locations that might be prohibitively expensive. Some startups might even require their own AS numbers.
Also the connectivity to the data centers or cloud infra like WAF , CDNs etc will be definitely worse compared to cloud instances. Then comes firewalls, their configuration and their redundancy.
These things will matter if you're serious about your SaaS.You could definitely co-locate, but that's another cost, then comes the redundancy of everything, from servers, to disks to network (routers and switches etc).
I personally believe that modern hardware is pretty reliable and doesn't need redundancy in every layer, but most people won't agree with and when startups have enough money, this doesn't matter to them.
I think the only reason the common public is unable to start SaaS is handling and managing these problems. Redundancy costs a lot. And many startups don't want to deal with it even if it'll help them in long run. They just gather enough cash and throw at the overlords.
I do hope that the general infra should improve so that can properly host their own.
Nevertheless I'm still trying to start something in SaaS space and self host from my home...
> Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house
I fail to see the point of this when the system you've to decided to run "yourself" is entirely owned and dependent on another American company.
Ah yes, MinIO, that open source S3 alternative that got archived last week. To me that's the biggest problem when self-hosting services. On day to day operations, some times it just breaks and the time to get it back varies from a couple of hours to a couple of days. And for the longer term you regularly have to upgrade things yourself which takes time and energy and is stressing for stateful deployment. And then you have it, at some point maintainers are just exhausted and the project is gone.
Are you actually using Exo for local clustered AI inference? I’ve considered it a few times and keep finding horror stories. Never seen someone report it’s actually working well for them.
Great post, and interesting setup - harkens to days of old, when this was simply how things were done in the first place - but one question that I have, apropos:
>.. serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers.
What is your network connectivity like for this setup? Presumably you operate in a building capable of giving you fiber, with a fixed IP, or something like that?
You say no VMs and are using Apple hardware. Are you running this all directly on macOS?