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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

#111

Post by bartread »

ramraj07 wrote: post #84
maxk42 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". T…

It's 50k MONTHLY users. It's just 3000 a day

It says in the article that the author gets 34k daily users, and 50k unique users/month. It would have been clearer if the author had talked about sessions (which are therefore > 1M/mo) for sure, but you're still making a very big (and invalid) assumption.

EDIT: Please disregard the above. I need an eye test, or maybe just to put my glasses on! Daily users are 3.4k (3400), not 34k. My apologies, I take it all back!

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

#112

Post by ianamartin »

bigiain wrote: post #69
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

That's not how green/blue deployments work. You don't keep both colors up unless you have completely failed to understand the concept.

Green/Blue is all about saving resources and costs, not keeping them around. You misread the cause here. It has nothing to do with deployment strategies.

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

#113

Post by moksly »

nbadg wrote: post #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 lang…

I think this article is frankly PR to get their users to generate revenue. It has nothing to do with the cost of hosting a python webapp.

I mean, why are you even doing analytics if you’re not generating revenue?

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

#114

Post by justinclift »

yread wrote: post #94
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a web app that's struggling if there are more than 2 concurrent users per CPU core. It's displaying incompressible large resolution images with EDIT: not sure why I'm downvoted, I'm just presenting my use case. They are multigigabyte images encoded with custom wavelet compression that are cut into tiles (think google earth), each user needs 5-10 tiles every second

Is it doing anything weird or fancy with those images?

If you're just serving them (eg no image manipulation), that sounds like there's a problem somewhere.

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

#115

Post by ForHackernews »

lacker wrote: post #18

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…

> It isn't that Facebook is wasting the vast majority of their infrastructure, though, it's that the application does a lot more for each user.

I don't think we can be sure Facebook isn't wasting money on their infrastructure. They've shown themselves to be pretty wasteful in the past.[0][1] They're just rich enough to get away with it.

Facebook's application may be doing a lot more to their users than a simpler app, but I doubt it's doing that much for users.

[0] https://www.cio.com/article/3197554/why-is-facebooks-ios-app...

[1] https://jaxenter.com/facebooks-completely-insane-dalvik-hack...

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

#116

Post by jillesvangurp »

aikah wrote: post #8

Nice, 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?

We use Google cloud run for this. They bill per request and you can run whatever docker container you want. I currently have a small setup with two separate kotlin based server applications running there (one based on spring boot and one on ktor). We use firestore as a cheap datbase (billed per read & write). Both have a free tier. So it's costing us next to nothing currently because neither docker container is getting a lot of traffic. Basically the bill for last month was only around 2$ for one of these applications (the other one I only deployed a few days ago).

Basically, at some point it gets expensive of course but when you are simply testing out stuff and don't expect a lot of users to show up, it's actually not bad.

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

#117

Post by cinquemb »

maxk42 wrote: post #65
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". T…

Similar situation (sub $1k/month) to the setup im doing for a start up in indonesia (top 7k in alexa, top 150 in indonesia), except we have to pay extra for media because we need to process the logs (long tail pdf/data/docx hits, and we need to control the dns and how other domains route to use so we cant use cloudflare). And still plenty of room to cost optimize.

Another consultant that came in and try to do this, made our costs go up by 10x per month… so i'm not surprised when I see stuff like this here…

The knowledge of ones tools available at ones finger tips and the relative costs of such seem to make the difference for these things.

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

#118

Post by pembrook »

I don’t understand some of the comments quibbling over how this person has a “bloated” stack because it costs more than whatever irrationally frugal setup they’ve created for an app that does X specific thing.

Here’s a bigger point:

If you’ve got 55,000 monthly active users, and $171 per month doesn’t feel like a rounding error to you, then what you made isn’t actually valuable.

Spending any amount of hours to reduce that already small number is a giant waste of time for anybody who has that level of traction.

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

#119

Post by matt42 »

yread wrote: post #94
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a web app that's struggling if there are more than 2 concurrent users per CPU core. It's displaying incompressible large resolution images with EDIT: not sure why I'm downvoted, I'm just presenting my use case. They are multigigabyte images encoded with custom wavelet compression that are cut into tiles (think google earth), each user needs 5-10 tiles every second

What http server do you use ? Are they static images ?

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

#120

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Haha, the man is clearly a beast of a product designer and executor. I don't think I would succeed with the same tools.

Honestly, spending $200/mo is insignificant to me. And I'm pretty happy to answer the question of "Why can this guy build this thing on a single VPS and you can't?" with "Well, because he's better than me".

I can be up in 15 mins on Heroku with a Rails+React web app. And in an hour have a thing. Or for a static no-login thing, faster with Netlify.

But it doesn't matter. Because I never made a product as nice as the one he made. If the outcome is I'm -$200/mo that is irrelevant to me. If the outcome is I'm +$50k/mo that is very relevant. So I'm going to optimize for how I can do the latter.

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