81–90 of 138 posts
$99K/month in hosting costs and no visible source of revenue... I think this baby is ready for an IPO!
Then the baby is ready for IPO.
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On the note of Twitter's restriction of API usage, Jack talked about it recently on the podcast Tales from the Crypt [0]. He doesn't give any specifics but attributes Twitters early struggle with uptime to unrestricted API usage [1]. [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-from-the-crypt/i... [1] https://overcast.fm/+KiHpBJHGo/15:30
That seems silly to me. They could have easily served their api from another server.
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$50k/month comes out to $600k/year which is the cost around 2-3 engineers counting overhead. To manage infrastructure at that scale themselves they'd need someone who knows DevOps. To write services at that scale they'd need someone who knows backend engineering and micro services. Then they'd need to be able to have 24/7 on call rotations for when things break. And of course, like any rewrite it seems like a "couple…
600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble. You could get just as talented of a team from a Nordic Country for example and only pay 120kish
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Moreover what if Heroku goes out of business? Then they’re f’d. Hosting on k8s, using Terraform or whatever would give them a lot of automation and provider independence.
I’m guessing I’m being grayed because I’m suggesting Heroku might go out of business? Ok let me explain. That is one scenario, it’s unlikely but there might be other similar scenarios that pose risk being tied in to one providers stack. DDOS, TOS issues, simply out growing them, Heroku themselves having TOS issues with their cloud. There are almost weekly posts on HN of “this major service is down” and “that major se…
Your comment is not only bad, but outright dangerous. This is a company that is burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars on hosting and staff with no business model yet. The primary risk to this company is not their host going away; the primary risk to this company is that they won't figure out how to make money. Worry about optimizing your serving infrastructure after you have a business that you know is worth saving.
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They say they spend $12,700/month on Fastly. I guess I don't know offhand the difference between Fastly and Imgix (which they also say is their CDN), but the levels of bandwidth they're talking about are not going to be free at Cloudflare. We serve significantly more bandwidth and requests than their 2016 numbers at under $15k compared to their $17.5k, and we're not particularly lean on infra costs being a .Net shop…
> the levels of bandwidth they're talking about are not going to be free at Cloudflare Correct. Cloudflare's terms state that you can't serve a disproportionate/substantial amount of non-HTML content, so they would need to sign up for Enterprise with a full contract to get image serving via CF. Enterprise is generally $5k+/month, but CF contracts can offer a subset of enterprise features from $500-$5k/month, so I wou…
Fastly is used for their actual website, judging by the ASN info. Meaning they wouldn't be serving petabytes of images from CloudFlare, just HTML/CSS/JS, which should be perfectly fine.
how do they monetize ? i can't find the monetization ...
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Yeah something doesn't add up. I'll believe Heroku is easier, but can it be that much easier? For people spending piles of cash on their webscale?
I work for a company that runs multiple major websites pulling in tens of millions of users a month. We run on Heroku. We made that decision when we didn't have a single user. Right now we're a team with 25 engineers. Every time we need to re-negotiate our contract with Heroku we ask ourselves whether we should move away from Heroku or not. So far, the answer has always been no. Complexity would go up and the time sp…
For the record, you get this with Azure too. Not sure about AWS and GCP, but I would have assumed the same.
That's a great blog post. Very transparent. I'm especially glad he's willingly giving up cheaper alternative for having more value from his services. I just would have liked some more details on what it means technically... :-)
What's the business model here? We would never run with such expensive options for this functionality, especially if it was a free/donations powered service. This company raised $7.5M though: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...
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600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble. You could get just as talented of a team from a Nordic Country for example and only pay 120kish
Realistically the costs for the company are higher. At least in The Netherlands the total costs for the employer is between 2-3x because of social security, health insurance, pension, housing/office costs.