Cost of servers and DB don't match DO's current pricing.
4 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 80GB disk costs $40/month now so two servers alone cost $80 which is higher than $69.
Either DO raised pricing or they got some special discount.
Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
21–30 of 264 posts
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#22It always makes my head dizzle when I read and hear how much people manage to bloat their stack because they think they need to "scale". I have web applications running that reliably serve 50k users per day and cost me $10/month, running on a single, cheap VPS.
Not to sound mean, but if there aren't posts/blogs/whatever explicitly telling people how to minimize costs... then they'll continue to follow the ones that make them pay $100+.
basically most people don't do that for saving costs, but just because it makes sense to them. And there's lots of tutorials explaining how to run your own webapp.
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#23I have seen a web app for 1,000 monthly users spend $1000/month for it.
Those were all paid users and the company was profitable with over 70% net margins after all costs including labor and research were factored in.
I’m all for $5/month digital ocean hosting when it makes sense but you also need to be realistic if there are revenues. Hosting should not be a major cost for the business.
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#24It always makes my head dizzle when I read and hear how much people manage to bloat their stack because they think they need to "scale". I have web applications running that reliably serve 50k users per day and cost me $10/month, running on a single, cheap VPS.
Not to sound mean, but if there aren't posts/blogs/whatever explicitly telling people how to minimize costs... then they'll continue to follow the ones that make them pay $100+.
Ok, here is a quick tutorial:
Step 1:
Copy Peter Levels stack:
https://www.nocsdegree.com/pieter-levels-learn-coding/
If he serves hundreds of thousands of monthly users and makes a million a month with a single VPS, you certainly won't have scaling issues when you start out or just have tens of thousands of users.
Step 2:
If you really scale beyond that, resist the urge to bloat your stack. Think long and hard about every piece you add to it. Really understand each piece you add to it. Don't fall into the trap of paid services. Don't fall into the trap of "best practices".
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#25I'm not familiar with Python as a web stack but to me it looks that the DO instances are a bit over-scaled for 55k monthly users.
But what caught my eye was DNS Hosting: 5$/Month? Maybe it's a typo, shouldn't be more like 10$ per year to host a domain and its DNS?
Anyway, thanks for sharing, very interesting.
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#26I have seen a web app for 1,000 monthly users spend $1000/month for it. Those were all paid users and the company was profitable with over 70% net margins after all costs including labor and research were factored in. I’m all for $5/month digital ocean hosting when it makes sense but you also need to be realistic if there are revenues. Hosting should not be a major cost for the business.
And most of the time isn't, right? I have seen project managers keeping a whole development team of 10+ developers busy for entire sprints to "cut down the infra costs", without realizing that the dev team costs 500+ kEUR/quarter, while the hosting costs were something like 7/8 kEUR/month.
Also, related aritcle -> https://m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-basecamp-operation...
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#27It always makes my head dizzle when I read and hear how much people manage to bloat their stack because they think they need to "scale". I have web applications running that reliably serve 50k users per day and cost me $10/month, running on a single, cheap VPS.
It always amazes me how people are so free to judge other's situations.
It's great that your web app only costs $10/month but others may have web apps that are more computationally intensive e.g. video processing or ML inference etc or simply can't join everything they need at runtime.
And it's great that you're willing to deny those 50k users a day access to your service when that cheap VPS inevitably falls over. But others may be monetising that traffic and will want a HA solution so their revenue isn't impacted.
All of those add complexity and cost to an architecture.
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#28Nice 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 ass…
Seems like DigitalOcean bill should be $10-20/month max.
Metabase is cool but you could probably use Mode Analytics free tier.
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#29Cost of servers and DB don't match DO's current pricing. 4 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 80GB disk costs $40/month now so two servers alone cost $80 which is higher than $69. Either DO raised pricing or they got some special discount.
Well spotted. I just actually looked at my bills because of this comment. Turns out that I resized my droplets in mid-august so this month's bill will reflect the full/true cost.
I'm going to edit the article.
Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
#30Cost of running it myself on my $30/mo colocation server: $30 oh yeah, and 10$ a year domain fee
I'd also really be interested what kind of domain costs USD10 PER MONTH. With my registrar, even .co and .sh cost at most USD60 per year...