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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

#61

Post by tristanperry »

TekMol wrote: post #50
FrozenSynapse wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I beg to differ. In my experience, the complicated setups that are justified by the argument of "reliability" have more downtime then a single VPS. The reason is probably that there are more moving parts and more has to be maintained / can go wrong. These days, a single VPS in the right datacenter has excellent uptime.

Agreed. I'll probably be downvoted, but these setups strike me as people who prefer to drink the cool aid than be pragmatic and only use what they need.

I've also had very high reliability rates with a single VPS. They've actually given me less downtime than AWS services at times.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#62

Post by TekMol »

bigiain wrote: post #53
TekMol wrote: post #12

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 get what you're saying, but I think you're being a bit harsh. 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…

If we were on a site called "CV News" that teaches people how to get jobs in dull cooperations, I might agree with you. On the other hand, I would not frequent such a site. So we would never have had this discussion.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#63

Post by smt88 »

TekMol wrote: post #50
FrozenSynapse wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I beg to differ. In my experience, the complicated setups that are justified by the argument of "reliability" have more downtime then a single VPS. The reason is probably that there are more moving parts and more has to be maintained / can go wrong. These days, a single VPS in the right datacenter has excellent uptime.

I have a VPS that has not gone down in 5 years.

It still has a redundant slave because I'm not going to bet my reputation on everything going right.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#65

Post by maxk42 »

threeseed wrote: post #27
TekMol wrote: post #12

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 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. Bu…

TekMoi is right. I have an Alexa top 6k site which is vastly more complicated (media hosting, load balancing, multiple VMs, DDOS protection, transactional emails, automated backups) which costs $200 / month on AWS.

The fact that this person is spending nearly as much to support 50k users a day as I do to support more than 4 million cannot be hand-waived away by "people are so free to judge other's[sic] situations". The matter is worsened by the fact that the application is so simple that it doesn't even support user accounts. There is room for discussion here about efficiency in application architecture. More importantly, an article billing itself as "Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users" is silly because there is no way this is representative of anything. I'm afraid new hackers will be scared by the high costs listed here and be discouraged in their own efforts.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#66

Post by lomereiter »

mjburgess wrote: post #60
TekMol wrote: post #12

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.

The additional expense in OP had nothing to do with scale; it arises from: redundancy, analytics, off-the-shelf integrations. It is a common misunderstanding amongst software engineers that infrastructure serves "performance". Most of the complexity comes from redundancy and analytics (, realtime especially).

Right, but how much do these nice-to-haves add to the revenue? Is it truly worth it to bake them all in from the very beginning? E.g. five minutes of downtime in morning hours will affect only a handful of users, and if so, why bother with blue-green deployments other than out of professional interest?

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#67

Post by chillfox »

TekMol wrote: post #24
tsumnia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t know how many times I have seen “best practices” used as excuse to avoid thinking. Usually by people who don’t even have the problem that the supposed “best practices” is meant to solve.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#68

Post by smt88 »

TekMol wrote: post #12

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.

Dev time is more expensive than server time.

If my dev uses a slow stack or doesn't optimize v1, maybe I spent $100/mo instead of $10/mo.

Hell, let's say I'm spending $500/mo.

My mixed rate is ~$75/hr for dev time, so a week of dev time is equivalent to 6 months of hosting.

If optimizing (or using a difficult stack) takes one dev an extra week, then I'd better save $3,000 of hosting.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#69

Post by bigiain »

threeseed wrote: post #27
TekMol wrote: post #12

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 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. Bu…

To be fair, the post show that about 2/3rds of that spend is from the decision to run twice the needed capacity to be able to do green blue deployments, and to cloud host their metabase analytics.

And it explains there's currently zero revenue.

So it seems fair to judge the situation there based off those pieces of information we've been given.

As I posted elsewhere, the OP's choice to run dual redundant green/blue capable instances and cloud hosted metabase might have good reasons, but right now those reasons are not "wanting a HA solution so revenue isn't impacted"...

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#70

Post by chillfox »

aahortwwy wrote: post #38
tsumnia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+.

Don't do blue-green deploys when you have no revenue. Downtime costs you nothing and at 3,400 visitors a day you'll be lucky to drop a single request while deploying. Pre-compute and cache to reduce your need for beefy servers. When you can run something on your machine or in the cloud, choose your machine. EDIT: It's less about saving money and more about not spending it. EDIT2: Forgot to mention: use SQLite.

SQLite Really is a bit of a hidden gem.
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