How Your Startup Can Leverage Production-Grade Infrastructure for Less than $200/Month

As a startup founder, your top priority is delivering value to your users through your product or service. But before you can start onboarding customers, you need a reliable, scalable infrastructure in place to power your application. Many early-stage startups shy away from investing in production-grade infrastructure, viewing it as complex and cost-prohibitive. They opt to run on a shoestring budget, figuring they‘ll cross the infrastructure bridge when they get to it.

I‘m here to show you that you can in fact set up a solid, production-ready infrastructure today for less than $200 per month. With the rise of cloud computing and innovative IaaS and PaaS providers, the barriers to entry and costs have dropped dramatically. In this post, I‘ll walk through the key components you‘ll need and my recommendations on the leading low-cost providers. By the end, you‘ll have a clear roadmap to building out a fully-functional infrastructure that can scale with your startup as it grows.

Hosting Your Backend API

Most modern applications are powered by an API on the backend. You‘ll need a reliable place to host this. My recommendation is Heroku. It supports most popular languages including Ruby, Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, and Go. Deployments are dead simple – just push your code to Heroku‘s servers and it will automatically build and deploy your app.

For your staging environment, go with a single "hobby" dyno at $7/month. For production, start with two "standard 1X" dynos at $25/month each for a total of $50/month. So for $57/month, you‘ve got a solid foundation for your API that can scale up as your traffic grows. The best part is you won‘t be wasting hours managing servers.

Some may argue that deploying to raw AWS EC2 instances is more cost-effective than Heroku. But those comparisons often overlook the operational costs of EC2. By the time you factor in the developer hours needed to configure servers, load balancers, deployments, etc. the costs far surpass the price difference with Heroku. Heroku removes all that overhead so you can focus your precious development resources on building product, not babysitting infrastructure.

Database Hosting

Every API needs a database behind it. If you‘re using Postgres, I recommend provisioning your database through Heroku as well. It will be more performant, since your DB will be in the same data center as your app servers. And you‘ll have one less vendor to manage.

If you need MongoDB, Redis, or other databases, check out Compose.io. Their hosted databases are incredibly easy to set up and maintain. The entry-level plans have more than enough juice to power you through the early stages.

I suggest using separate databases for your staging and production environments, to insulate prod data from any issues that may arise as you test new code in staging. Compose‘s entry level MongoDB plan starts at $31/month, so you‘re looking at $62/month total.

One note on MongoDB hosting: mLab is another popular choice. We originally used them at my last startup. However, even their lowest price dedicated plan was over $200/month after adding backup and other key features. Meanwhile, our resource utilization was in the single digit percentages. Compose‘s pay-as-you-go model ended up being much more cost effective. So be sure to rightsize your database plan to your actual scale and throughput needs.

Hosting Your Front-end

Now that your API is sorted, let‘s talk about your front-end. Whether you‘ve built a web app, marketing site, documentation portal, or other front-end assets, Netlify is hands-down the easiest way to get it live on the internet.

Netlify pioneered the "git-centric" development workflow. You simply connect your GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab repository to Netlify, specify your build command and target directory, and you‘re off to the races. Now every time you push code to your repo, Netlify will automatically build and deploy your front-end.

They also provide a generous free tier that can easily support your staging environment. For production, step up to the $9/month tier to access additional bandwidth, user roles, and other features. Don‘t forget to configure your custom domain and provision a free Let‘s Encrypt SSL certificate through the Netlify UI.

File Storage and Delivery

Most applications need to store and serve user-generated content like profile photos, documents, and other assets. Amazon‘s Simple Storage Service (S3) is the de facto standard. S3 provides eleven 9‘s of durability, unlimited storage capacity, and a pay-only-for-what-you-use cost model.

For your application, create two S3 buckets – one for staging and one for prod. You can safely make these buckets public to serve files directly to your end users. This will help reduce the load on your API.

And here‘s the best part – S3 is completely free for your first year. After that, you‘ll pay around $0.03/GB which is still dirt cheap. So you‘re looking at $0 all-in to start.

Keeping an Eye on Your Infrastructure

With your infrastructure up and running, you‘ll sleep much better at night knowing you‘ve got full visibility into the health of your production systems. Implementing the right monitoring stack from the start will help you proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact your customers. Here‘s what I recommend:

Centralized Logging with Papertrail

The first step is aggregating your application and server logs to a central location. Papertrail makes this a breeze. Just add Papertrail as a Heroku add-on to immediately start capturing logs from your dynos. The free plan is sufficient for your staging app. For production, upgrade to the $7/month plan to retain up to 50MB per day and 1 year of searchable history.

Papertrail provides an intuitive, web-based log viewer with the ability to setup saved searches and alerts. Be sure to configure an alert to ping you on Slack if any error level logs appear in production.

Error Tracking with Sentry

Papertrail will capture your application errors, but it can still be challenging to sift through the noise to identify unique, high-impact issues. That‘s where Sentry comes in.

Sentry captures and aggregates your exceptions across all your languages and platforms. It intelligently groups related errors and provides deep context so you can quickly reproduce and resolve them. The Slack integration is key – you‘ll immediately see a descriptive error report posted any time your app experiences a unique exception.

Sentry‘s free tier includes 5,000 events per month which is plenty to start. Upgrade to the $29/month team tier if you have multiple developers who need visibility.

Uptime Monitoring

By default, you have no way to know if your web app goes down. Enter uptime monitoring. Services like Pingdom and Uptime Robot will constantly check your site and alert you the moment downtime is detected.

I‘m a fan of Uptime Robot, as it has a generous free plan that allows you to monitor up to 50 URLs at 5 minute intervals. Be sure to set up monitors for both your staging and production environments. And naturally, configure the Slack integrations for those real-time pings.

Infrastructure and Application Metrics

The final piece of the monitoring puzzle is metrics. You‘ll want to keep an eye on key infra metrics like CPU, memory, I/O wait, and network throughput so you can proactively scale your environment. On the app side, metrics like response times, error rates, and throughput will give you a pulse for the health of your API.

Heroku offers some basic metrics out of the box, but for longer retention and a more comprehensive view, I recommend Librato. They offer seamless Heroku integration via an add-on. Provision the free plan for staging and the $19/month "Nickel" plan for production to access up to 4 weeks of metric history. This should be sufficient runway to identify and respond to any worrisome trends before they impact your users.

Bonus: Low Cost Dev Tools

Since we still have $13 left in our $200 monthly budget, let‘s see what other tools we can add to power up your dev team:

• GitHub offers free public repositories, but charges for private ones. Consider Bitbucket instead which provides unlimited free private repositories for teams of 5 or less.

• For project planning and bug tracking, check out JIRA. You can get started on the $10/month plan which includes all the core features you need.

• Every good engineering team needs a CI/CD pipeline. My favorite low-cost provider is CircleCI. Their free plan includes unlimited repos, users, and builds for Linux.

• Lastly, don‘t pay full price for Google Apps or Office365. Check out Zoho which offers full-featured email hosting at just $1/user/month.

Wrapping Up

Let‘s sum up all the running costs we‘ve outlined:

• Heroku (API + DB): $119/month
• Netlify (front-end hosting): $9/month
• AWS S3 (file storage): $0/month
• Uptime Robot: Free
• Papertrail: $7/month
• Sentry: $29/month
• Librato: $19/month
• Bitbucket: Free
• CircleCI: Free
• JIRA: $10/month
• Zoho email: $1/month (per user)

This brings our total infrastructure cost to just $194 per month – right under our $200 budget! And that includes a healthy mix of development tools to keep your engineering team cranking.

With this setup, you‘ll be well on your way to supporting your first 10,000 or even 100,000 users. You certainly don‘t need to start with a multi-region, auto-scaling, self-healing architecture on day one.

Instead, leverage the power of today‘s cloud infrastructure providers to stand up a lean, low-cost stack that will support you through your initial growth phase. Win those first customers, get your product out in the wild and iterate rapidly. Then you can justify spending more on your infrastructure as you start to layer in additional redundancy, data replication, and other more advanced configurations.

The key is avoiding distractions and keeping your burn rate as low as possible in the early days. Don‘t waste cycles on IT overhead that won‘t materially impact your ability to deliver customer value. With the approach outlined here, you‘ll have confidence that you‘re running on a modern, stable, production-grade infrastructure at a price point that any early stage startup can afford.

Now get out there and happy shipping!