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Ask HN: Designing the IT infra of a non-profit with a IT team of 1?

by vitorbaptistaa on 2/6/23, 7:37 PM with 1 comments

I'm helping a small non-profit handle their IT infrastructure. There's nothing too fancy, just:

* Main website using NodeJS (hosted on Vercel)

* Postgres Database in Azure

* MediaWiki (hosted on a VM in Azure)

* Custom-build SaaS (also on VMs in Azure)

* Scrapers (Azure)

That's basically it. There are multiple small VMs which costs us a good chunk of our IT budget. I'd love to centralize them in a cheap dedicated server from Hetzner, but I'm concerned that it would take too much of my limited time to maintain it.

I thought about Dokku for the small webapp and MediaWiki, but I don't have experience with it, so I don't know how easy it is to maintain once setup, how backups work, etc.

My main goals are:

* Easy to maintain (using technologies as boring as possible)

* Price (the company is in Brazil, where we can hire some non-IT person for ~$400 USD)

Any suggestions on how you would build this infra?

by quantisan on 2/12/23, 11:27 AM
It sounds like they have a stack that's working already, is that correct? If that's the case, why are you tasked to re-design it? Why not keep things running and improve only when and where it's needed?