I tried Neon a few months ago when attempting to switch away from a self hosted db. It was a horrible experience, customer support was unhelpful, it was glitchy, slow, and laggy, and even before the price increase their pricing was way too high.
Curious about your self-hosted db - was it also Postgres? How much had you played with pg before you tried Neon? Can you expand what you mean by 'glitchy, slow and laggy'? Slow connection due to cold starts? Scale-up? General inconsistency in performance? What kind of data volumes were you working with?
I ask because my experience with Neon has been completely different to what you just described. Ever since their 'closed beta' days, it has always 'just worked'. Their CLI has been great, none of my automation has ever bombed out without good reason, and I've never seen it cost me more than I expected. Notably, I was also able to self-host it with relative ease, and found that they actually encouraged people to do so. (In contrast, there are a number of similar 'open source' offerings such as Supabase that I've tried self-hosting, and found that while their core codebase is on GH, it is extremely difficult to deploy outside of their own environment. Not intended as a dig at Supabase, they do some really great work and contribute a ton back to the Postgres community - I'm just using them as a relevant example).
As an aside, I've also met people from Neon at various conferences, including co-founder Heikki. They all struck me as genuine Postgres enthusiasts & great fun to geek out with. Neon (like Supabase) have been _really_ pushing the envelope on Postgres for the last couple of years, and have sponsored some significant developments & proposals. In my view they're a 'real OSS company'. While that probably does rose-tint my view of them a little, that's important to me & makes me happier to give them my money. They've certainly done more for Postgres than AWS ever has.
Thank you for the confidence and praise! I do believe we, Neon, try to be as open as possible while also trying to build a business around this open source product.
I'm a proud PostgreSQL contributor myself and value the work of my collegues highly. However, it should be said that AWS' RDS PostgreSQL offering in late '13 significantly helped increase PostgreSQL adoption, and the recent contributions by AWS' own PostgreSQL Contributors Team should not be discounted. IIUC, their Aurora PostgreSQL offering also was the inspiration for Neon as a product, so I don't think that your last jab to AWS was justified like that.
I met with Heikki in Estonia for local Postgres user group meetup. That was when I first time heard about Neon. He is a true Postgres hacker and very cool guy to talk to
Hey, we do want to add numbers back to that page. The issue was that the original numbers were inaccurate.
"The goal of this metric is to represent the health of a system. However, we found this binary “is there an incident or not” approach wasn’t accurate for describing our service. For example, in the past 30 days, 99.9% of projects hosted on Neon had an uptime better than 99.95%; however, the status page displayed 99.89% uptime."
How many times do you expect to slice it? "For 99% of days this year, 99% of our customers have experienced 99% reliability for 99% of their users, we're 99% sure"? (That's just the long way of saying 95%)
When Neon goes down twitter lights up, we haven't had it for a long time now.
Internally we are measuring the number of projects under 5 min in the last 30 days and it's been lower double digits over 700K+ total databases under management.
A TON of effort is going there, twice a week standups, tightening our processes and quality across the board, a standing item in our monthly board meetings. While stability is black and white, what goes into delivering it is a long tail of small and large improvement and a major team effort.
If you're interested, our team also takes negative feedback to create points of emphasis on where we can improve. But I understand that takes time out of your day.
woof, that does not sound good. Can you say more about how you were connecting? What was slow / gitchy and laggy? Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details.
> Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details.
I’m not the parent commenter but just giving you a heads up that your HN profile doesn’t list any socials so I don’t know if people will find how to DM you. Unless you guys have a public Discord or something and it’s implied that that is how people would be able to DM you.
We were connecting over `pg` (NodeJS). The web dashboard was constantly logging me out and was overall a mess (although I'd imagine it might be a bit better now, given GA?). There's no DMs on HackerNews btw
node-postgres (pg, probably more specifically pg-pool) doesn't do too well with serverless, not handling TCP connections killed while in the pool (or something): https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres/issues/2112 (open since 2020)
A nice marketing opportunity for Neon/Supabase to get a fix officially released.
We did not hide it because it was going down. We hid it because it was an incorrect calculation. We are currently re-doing the our status page to look more like Snowflake's.
I don't have any proof, but you'll just have to trust me, which could be a tough ask. Neon really tries to be transparent in internal and external communication.
