Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
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Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
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Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#2I've grown fond of Caprover for this kind of small project. I would probably shove the metabase instance and both of the production instances into a single smaller instance (but I have been known to increase swap and put off upsizing resources in the past because cheapskate)
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#3I wonder how much it would cost for the same app, if developed in Java or dotnet core.
They could save a good chunk of the 69 USD they spend on Digital Ocean servers.
edit : To clarify, What I meant was that to serve 55k users, perhaps using more efficient languages like C# or Java, would allow them to run on lesser spec machines. And as those users scale up, to say a million users a month, perhaps savings would also increase, if using more performant languages.
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#4I wonder how much it would cost for the same app, if developed in Java or dotnet core. They could save a good chunk of the 69 USD they spend on Digital Ocean servers. edit : To clarify, What I meant was that to serve 55k users, perhaps using more efficient languages like C# or Java, would allow them to run on lesser spec machines. And as those users scale up, to say a million users a month, perhaps savings would also…
The language has nothing to do with it, this site could be ran on a $5/mo droplet (or a pair of them for their deployment strategy).
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#5I wonder how much it would cost for the same app, if developed in Java or dotnet core. They could save a good chunk of the 69 USD they spend on Digital Ocean servers. edit : To clarify, What I meant was that to serve 55k users, perhaps using more efficient languages like C# or Java, would allow them to run on lesser spec machines. And as those users scale up, to say a million users a month, perhaps savings would also…
What're they going to host it on, when they're finished the full rewrite to save 69usd?
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#6Nice writeup! Always appreciate transparency with these sorts of things, as someone who writes a lot of tiny personal projects and sometimes wonders how much I'd have to invest if they ever actually gained any traction. Congrats on having so many users, and good luck on monetization.
For the server instances, I can't imagine 4 CPUs/8 gigs RAM is really needed 24/7, but can imagine it being needed in bursts, and I assume GCP has various "elastic" auto-scaling products for that. Would love to know if your metrics indicate that this is the smallest box you could comfortably run on, or if it's just a best-guess. Could potentially spin down blue-green environments after some set amount of time (once you know a deploy "succeeded"), as well.
For Metabase, I can't find any "system requirements," but I'm not _super_ shocked by the price tag. I've always liked the idea of hosting my own tools instead of relying on some SaaS's free/trial tiers (particularly for things like analytics, logging, or metrics), but a lot of the open source options out there assume you have a pretty hefty box to throw it at. At the same time, I haven't found any better alternative other than just doing ad-hoc analyzing in SQL (using a GUI like Postico).
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#7I wonder how much it would cost for the same app, if developed in Java or dotnet core. They could save a good chunk of the 69 USD they spend on Digital Ocean servers. edit : To clarify, What I meant was that to serve 55k users, perhaps using more efficient languages like C# or Java, would allow them to run on lesser spec machines. And as those users scale up, to say a million users a month, perhaps savings would also…
Metabase is written in Java and normally take 1-2GB/ram and use a lot of CPU ;)
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#8Nice, we need more of these "real world expenses" posts on HN. I wonder how much it would cost to run the same app powered with Java. More? or Less?
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#9Cost of running it myself on my $30/mo colocation server: $30
oh yeah, and 10$ a year domain fee
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#10> The webapp runs on two identical DigitalOcean servers... The database is a hosted Postgres instance also on DigitalOcean.
They're only spending $69/mo total at DigitalOcean, and it sounds like their scaling isn't limited by computational power but rather by operational concerns. So, I'm not entirely sure what the backend language has to do with the costs here.
If you're trying to draw a cost comparison between languages, then the take-home from this writeup is that 55k monthly users is small enough that the backend language doesn't make a difference in costs.
Side note, this kind of transparency is always really nice to see!