I appreciate your enthusiastic advocacy for Bubble, but let’s assume people on the forum are operating in good faith. This is an extremely positive community, and while many people participate, others lurk – everyone is welcome and I appreciate when lurkers chime in!
I can confirm @feee is a Bubble customer who is running a high traffic website on a dedicated plan.
I wasn’t aware they were looking to move off of Bubble, and I’m sorry to hear it. As @feee mentions, I’ve helped them with performance issues in the past, but haven’t had as much time to investigate individual Bubble apps lately. Improving performance generally involves understanding how Bubble works end-to-end, and we’re short on people who can do that, which is why my priority right now is hiring and training.
Without spending time on it, I can’t say whether @feee is up against fundamental limitations of the system, or if there are further optimizations we can do. @feee, I don’t know how deep you’ve gone down the re-building off Bubble route: if you’re still willing to consider staying, message me and we can commit to spending a little bit of time late next week evaluating if it’s possible (no promises) to improve your app’s performance in the near-term to make it good enough for your needs. (Probably by taking one particular feature of your app and using that as a proof-of-concept to see if we can get decent performance for it, and probably by giving you suggestions on how to change the app design rather than by changing Bubble’s code, but we’d see).
To address the concerns about support and capacity that several people on the thread are mentioning:
We prioritize support tickets from customers on team, production, and dedicated plans, but we’re still handling them with the same small team that handles all our incoming requests, so while the level of support we provide is better, it isn’t radically different. I would like us to be able to sell premium support the way larger players like AWS does, where we can commit to strict SLAs and provide 24 / 7 coverage, but we’re still working on building out a team that can handle that. Currently, most of the money for large dedicated plans goes to hardware, overhead, and backend costs: we don’t have phone support priced in. (I think our pricing is extremely competitive compared to hiring out the team that would be necessary to achieve similar results through code). I know that for a lot of our users, premium support would make Bubble a lot more appealing, so we definitely want to offer it, but I also think it’s important for support to be able to actually resolve problems, and that means building the team from engineering forward rather than just getting more warm bodies, which is a slow thing to build out.
In terms of concerns about whether buying capacity has an effect on performance, the thing to remember is that capacity doesn’t buy speed, it buys scale. Think of checking out at a supermarket: if the supermarket adds more registers, the time it takes for the clerk to ring you up doesn’t change: they still have to scan all your items and add them to the bag. But, the supermarket as a whole can handle more customers at the same time. You might see a performance increase adding more capacity because if there was a long line for a single register, adding more capacity can shorten the line. But the max speed is still going to be the time it takes for a single register to check-out a single customer.
Re:
Great, I’ve added it to our list – I do need to do some more investigation to confirm if it’s feasible, but I suspect it is, and that it’s a relatively quick change rather than a long one.