I'm curious about the development practices of solo developers working on hobby projects. If you're building something in your spare time that has between 1,000 and 10,000 users and you update it once or twice a month, do you typically set up a staging environment?
Would you go with just:
**A. Local and Production**
or
**B. Local, Staging, and Production?**
I've heard that having a staging environment might come at a cost of around $10-$20 a month, but I'm wondering if that's generally worth it for a project at this scale.
5 Answers
Honestly, I skipped staging altogether until my app hit about 25k users. I just pushed updates directly and dealt with issues as they came. My users actually found some of the bugs, and I got valuable feedback from that!
I would definitely recommend having a staging environment if you're already seeing 1-10k users. It’s about mitigating risk; something could break when you deploy, and you don’t want to ruin your users' experience. Plus, many platforms, like Azure, offer reasonable options for staging without breaking the bank.
That sounds really efficient! Thanks for the insight!
For a project of this scale, I’d suggest just keeping it simple with local and production at first. Staging can be more overhead than it’s worth unless you start bringing in complex features or if you have a way to streamline testing.
Most developers agree that having a staging environment is valuable, even for smaller projects. For those with a user base of 1,000 to 10,000, it can really help in testing before going live. If you can swing it, it's a good practice!
Staging environments are really about your needs. If you're likely to encounter bugs during updates, then they are essential. It's not just about user count; sometimes the complexity of your app warrants it.
Absolutely! In fact, Azure's app service allows for a staging environment and even lets you swap between staging and production without any downtime, as long as everything in staging works fine.