Ship Fast, Monitor Faster: DevOps for the Solo Builder

The Solo Builder Reality

You're shipping a SaaS. Or maybe three. You handle:

• Feature development
• Bug fixes
• Customer support
• Marketing
• Sales
• DevOps
• ...everything

There's no ops team to page when something breaks at 2 AM. There's no SRE to investigate performance issues. There's just you, maybe a co-founder, and a dream.

This guide is for you.

The 5 Things That WILL Break

Not might break. Will break. Plan for them.

1. Your Database Will Run Out of Connections

It happens to everyone. You're using a hosted database (Supabase, PlanetScale, Neon), you hit the connection limit, and suddenly nothing works.

Prevention:

• Use connection pooling from day one
• Monitor connection counts in your database dashboard
• Set up alerts before you hit limits, not after

2. Your Third-Party API Will Go Down

Stripe, SendGrid, your AI provider—they all have outages. And when they go down, your users think YOU'RE down.

Prevention:

• Have fallback behavior (graceful degradation)
• Don't let a third-party failure break your entire app
• Monitor your upstream dependencies

3. Your SSL Certificate Will Expire

"But I have auto-renewal!" Cool. It still fails sometimes. Cloudflare has issues. Let's Encrypt has rate limits. Things break.

Prevention:

• Monitor SSL expiry dates
• Get alerts 14 days before expiration
• Have a manual renewal process documented

4. Your Deploy Will Break Production

You ship a bug. It happens. The question is how fast you notice.

Prevention:

• Monitor immediately after every deploy
• Have a rollback plan (know how to revert quickly)
• Don't deploy on Fridays (yes, really)

5. Your Site Will Get Slow

That N+1 query? It's fine with 100 users. With 10,000? Your site crawls.

Prevention:

• Monitor Core Web Vitals
• Set up performance alerts
• Actually load test before going viral (wishful thinking, I know)

The Solo Ops Toolkit

Here's what you actually need, sorted by priority:

Must Have (Day 1)

Uptime Monitoring

Know when your site is down. This is non-negotiable. Free options exist. There's no excuse.

Error Tracking

Sentry, LogRocket, whatever. Know when errors happen in production. Users won't always tell you.

Basic Logging

Vercel logs, Cloudflare logs, console.log (seriously)—something. You need to be able to investigate.

Should Have (Week 1)

Performance Monitoring

Core Web Vitals, response times. Know when things are slow before users complain.

Database Monitoring

Connection counts, query times, storage usage. Your database dashboard usually has this.

Backup Strategy

For your database at minimum. Ideally for everything.

Nice to Have (Month 1)

Dependency Scanning

Know when your packages have vulnerabilities.

Security Headers Check

Know if you're following basic security practices.

SEO Monitoring

Know if your site is properly indexed and performing.

The Alert Philosophy

Too many alerts = alert fatigue = ignored alerts = missed problems.

Here's how to set up alerts that actually work:

Alert Immediately

• Site is down (not responding)
• Error rate spikes above normal
• Critical security vulnerabilities

Alert Daily (Digest)

• Performance degradation
• Non-critical dependency updates
• Approaching resource limits

Alert Weekly (Report)

• SEO changes
• Usage trends
• Non-urgent updates

Don't Alert

• Every 404 error
• Every minor version update
• Things you can't act on

The 2 AM Problem

Your site goes down at 2 AM. What happens?

Bad scenario: You wake up to 47 angry support emails and tweets.

Good scenario: You wake up to one notification: "Site was down 2:07-2:09 AM, auto-recovered, no action needed."

Best scenario: The auto-recovery worked, you didn't wake up, and you read about it in your morning digest.

The goal isn't to never have problems. It's to:

• Know about problems before users do
• Have automated recovery for common issues
• Sleep through the ones that fix themselves
• Wake up only for the ones that need you

Practical Automation for Solo Builders

Auto-Recovery

Vercel/Netlify:

Deploys auto-recover on failure (rollback to last working version).

Database:

Most hosted databases auto-restart on failure.

Edge Functions:

They restart automatically. That's the point.

Health Checks

Create a /health or /api/health endpoint that:

• Returns 200 if everything's working
• Checks database connectivity
• Checks critical external services
• Returns fast (under 500ms)

Point your uptime monitor at this. Now you're monitoring real health, not just "server responds."

Deploy Verification

After every deploy:

• Automated tests run
• Health check runs
• If fail, auto-rollback
• If success, notify (optional)

Daily Automated Checks

• Dependency scan runs
• SEO crawl runs
• SSL expiry check runs
• Backup verification runs

You shouldn't have to remember to do these. They should happen automatically.

The Real Secret: Reduce Surface Area

The best ops strategy for solo builders? Less to monitor.

• Fewer services = fewer failure points
• Managed services = someone else's ops problem
• Edge functions = no servers to maintain
• Serverless database = no connection pooling nightmares

Every architectural choice is also an ops choice. Choose boring technology. Choose managed services. Choose less.

Your Monday Morning Routine

Here's what healthy solo DevOps looks like:

• Check dashboard (2 min): Any red indicators? Any alerts from the weekend?
• Review digest (3 min): What happened while you were offline?
• Check dependencies (2 min): Any security issues? Any updates to schedule?
• Glance at performance (1 min): Trending up? Trending down?

Total: Under 10 minutes.

If you're spending hours on ops every day, something's wrong. Either your stack is too complex or your monitoring is too noisy.

The Bottom Line

You're a solo builder. You can't do ops like Netflix does ops. You shouldn't try.

Instead:

• Automate everything that can be automated
• Alert only on things you can and will act on
• Use managed services that handle their own ops
• Accept that some things will break
• Set up systems to catch them quickly

Ship fast. Monitor faster. Sleep soundly.

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SlyDuck monitors uptime, dependencies, performance, and SEO across all your projects in one dashboard. Built for developers who do everything themselves. Start monitoring — first project is always free.