– Shipping an MVP in a bit under 6 months working on it nights and weekends

– About 125 videos are rendered per day (~30k since the 2+ years it’s been up)

– Motivation for using Express and Node and a few libs he’s using server side

– The app is mostly monolithic and Bull handles processing background tasks

– A background task spawns DigitalOcean servers for video rendering

– Both the Node back-end and JS front-end are in the same repo and share code

– The shared code lets you get real-time video previews straight in the browser

– Create React App was used as a base to build the front-end

– Hugo powers the marketing site and is hosted on Netlify

– There’s no custom theme, it’s all hand crafted CSS using SASS

– Both Stripe and PayPal are used to handle 1 time and subscription payments

– The admin back-end is a bunch of API endpoints protected by an admin user flag

– PostgreSQL is the primary database and no ORM is being used

– TypeScript is used through out the code base / nginx + Cloudflare is being used

– Docker isn’t being used in development / Postmark is used for sending emails out

– Blue / Green deploys with Terraform, Packer and nginx on DigitalOcean

– Ubuntu LTS is running on all of the servers

– 1 CPU / 1 GB for the API server & load balancer, 1 CPU / 3 GB for the renderers

– Paid videos get a CPU optimized render server with 4 CPUs / 8 GB of memory

– Videos use up a lot of storage and they’re stored on DigitalOcean Spaces

– Ansible was used in the past but now everything is baked into the Packer image

– The deploy process from development to production

– Database migrations are run out of band with a tool called Dbmate

– Backups are handled with DigitalOcean’s automated backups

– Alarms, alerts, monitoring and error reporting

– The paid plan has unlimited video uploads and overall hosting is ~$125 / month

– Best tips? You can’t go too wrong with choosing boring technology

– Check out SongRender (IG / Twitter), Jake has a personal blog and is on Twitter too