Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:15 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #133

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…

Both you and TekMoi should probably value your own time higher. The cost savings are great, but once you spend 4 hours on configuring a database server, that'll probably be $200+ worth of your time and, thus, wipe out most of the savings.

Post by benhurmarcel » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #118

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…

Post by thatwasunusual » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

kjaftaedi wrote: post #93

isatty wrote: post #36

$30 dedicated from Hetzner can do this reliably enough for a non revenue generating blog, including blue green deploys, postgres, certs, cache, edge caches (Cloudflare I guess) and even Metabase (which admittedly can be a memory hog if you don't set it in the JVM).

I put some VMs in Hetzner for a project I was working on, and found out you get what you pay for. They mistakenly deleted all of my virtual machines and all of my backups. If you host anything with them, or anyone I guess for that matter, make sure you have your backups hosted somewhere else.

Post by mping » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

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

Post by aahortwwy » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

limteary wrote: post #127

aahortwwy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why use SQLite? My postgres process doesn't come close to using up enough resources to push me out of even the cheap VPS tiers and I don't have to worry about locking if there's a heavy write load.