51–60 of 264 posts
It's tough to generalize from things like this because "a webapp for 55k monthly users" can mean drastically different things. A user could be loading a few static pages, or that same user could be opening websocket connections or making requests that require expensive database queries. Your average user could stick around a minute, or an hour. Different apps can easily have per-monthly-user infrastructure costs that…
I 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).
It 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.
In my mind, choosing a dual redundant prod platform so you can do blue/green deployments is _totally_ unnecessary for a 55k MAU site generating no revenue. Same with cloud hosted metabase. You could run that on your own hardware - a spare laptop or probably even a raspberry pi for effectively nothing.
On the other hand, a hobby project/side gig where you can demonstrate real world experience in those two things could _easily_ pay off in the first week of a new job it helps you land.
If it's _just_ that extra $100/month they're spending there, it seems difficult to justify. If it's commercial experience doing that which is helping him try and land a job paying 20k or more extra per year? That's totally money well spent, in my opinion...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article does not mention video processing or ML. It describes their setup for what they describe as a generic web app.
If you want to provide uninterrupted service to your clients you’ll have to spend some $. You want to have redundancy, machines hosted in different different locations, backup prod servers, monitoring, analysis tools. Even if it is for 1k monthly users, if you want reliability - it will increase the costs.
Yes some of the other tools could arguably be worth paying for, but if the author's concern is that he's short on money and $140 is a lot, why didn't they KISS and only use what they need? Then scale as and when needed in the future.
Y'know, do what HN regularly preaches?
Cost 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...
"How much does running a webapp in production actually cost? Maybe more than you think. [...] In total that’s around $145 USD per month." I thought that was going a really different direction than it ended up going.
It 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.
I'v added this paragraph to the article: the servers are oversized for the load we're currently seeing. The reason for that is that we tried to solve a production issue by increasing the server specs. It didn't solve the problem, and now we can't down-size the servers without re-provisioning them ️.
You should really learn to add new servers by provisioning them and remove the old servers. Your app seems a perfect fit for it for moving between servers.
It 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 is a common misunderstanding amongst software engineers that infrastructure serves "performance". Most of the complexity comes from redundancy and analytics (, realtime especially).