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# Infrastructure |
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How we choose, run, and manage the services that power Makenot.work. |
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## Philosophy |
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We self-host where practical. Every vendor is a dependency, a potential point of failure, and a cost passed to creators. When we do use external services, we choose carefully. |
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### Commodity Over Premium |
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We go with the cheapest reliable option, not the one with the fanciest dashboard. |
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### No Lock-In |
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We avoid services that make it hard to leave: |
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- **Standard formats:** Data stored in formats that work anywhere |
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- **Exportable configurations:** Settings we can move to another provider |
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- **No proprietary APIs:** When possible, we use providers that implement open standards |
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- **Multi-provider capability:** Critical infrastructure can run on multiple vendors |
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If a provider doubles their prices or changes their terms, we can move. |
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### Open Source Where Possible |
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We prefer open source for software we run ourselves. Managed services sometimes make sense, but open source is the default. |
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### Cost Transparency |
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We can explain every line item in our infrastructure bill. See the economics documentation for the breakdown. |
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--- |
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## Production Stack |
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### Hetzner |
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- Application server + PostgreSQL: VPS in US-West (Oregon) |
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- Object storage (S3-compatible), in the EU: user files in Germany, SyncKit blobs and OTA artifacts in Finland |
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- Backup: bucket versioning enabled |
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- Exit: standard S3 API, portable to any S3-compatible provider |
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### PostgreSQL |
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- Self-hosted on Hetzner VPS |
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- Daily backups with 30-day retention |
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- Offsite backup replication to a separate machine on personal hardware in a different location |
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- No external managed service dependency |
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### Stripe |
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- Connect (creators onboard directly) |
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- Creators keep their Stripe accounts if they leave |
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- Exit: roadmap item (no backup processor integration yet) |
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### Postmark |
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- Transactional email (password reset, verification, receipts) |
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- Exit: self-hosted migration when scale justifies |
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### Fastmail |
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- Business email (support@, legal@, max@) |
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- Exit: self-hosted migration when scale justifies |
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### Cloudflare |
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- DNS management |
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- CDN for static assets and edge caching |
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- DDoS protection |
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- Free tier sufficient initially |
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### Domain Registrar (Cloudflare) |
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- All domains registered and managed through Cloudflare |
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## Why These Choices |
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**Hetzner over AWS/GCP:** 80% cost reduction, US and EU regions available, no vendor lock-in. |
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**Self-hosted PostgreSQL over managed:** No external dependency, full control over configuration and backups. |
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**Stripe Connect:** Direct payouts to creators without us touching funds. PCI compliance handled entirely by Stripe. |
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**Cloudflare:** Free tier covers most needs. |
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--- |
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## Redundancy |
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- Database: Daily automated backups (30-day retention) |
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- Files: Bucket versioning on object storage |
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- Application: Single-server today; load balancer planned at scale |
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- DNS: Cloudflare's anycast network |
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## Monitoring |
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Handled by PoM, a self-hosted production operations monitor we built. See [Monitoring](./monitoring.md) for details. |
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## Cost Philosophy |
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Infrastructure costs scale sub-linearly with creator count. We optimize for cost-efficiency, not impressive-sounding tech stacks. |
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## Trade-offs We Accept |
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Doing things the hard way has costs: |
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- **More operational work:** Self-hosted infrastructure means maintaining it |
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- **Slower feature development:** Time on infrastructure is time not on features |
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- **Learning curves:** Open source tools don't always have great documentation |
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The alternative (expensive vendor lock-in with costs passed to creators) is worse. |
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## See Also |
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- [Architecture](./architecture.md): system design and components |
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- [Security](./security.md): how we protect data |
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- [Monitoring](./monitoring.md): PoM and the health endpoint |
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