Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by zeku » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #128

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…

If $171 month is discouraging, let me reassure them. There’s statistically a 95-99%+ chance you’ll never get to 55k monthly users with your app so don’t worry!

Let's leave this kind of snark out of this community. It's comments like this that slippery slope a community from helpful to harmful. You see it each time a reddit community gets too large.

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

#212

Post by CapriciousCptl » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #98

tristanperry wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At work, I aim for four nines. (We put three nines in the legal paperwork). I can't hit four nines reliably with single VPS platforms on my typical workloads, I need load balancers and redundant app servers. I could quite likely hit three nines using single VPSes. But if a client wants 99.9% SLAs, they'll be paying for HA and I'll deploy redundant ec2 instances, multi region RDS, and an ELB. And charge them 3 or 4 ti…

I think ec2 gives 99.99% availability in their SLA, no need to scale across regions or even AZs. Multi AZ RDS is 99.95%. We have a simple ELB/EC2/RDS/S3 stack on us-east-1 and need high availability for a very small amount of users and run very cheap.

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

#213

Post by isatty » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:01 PM 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.

I don't have experience on their VM's and have only used the dedicates to host personal projects/and non critical infrastructure.

However, you should be treating your VMs as disposable and not as pets.

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

#214

Post by C1sc0cat » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:15 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #134

dx034 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if they can choose between saving 10% on infrastructure or adding 5% ad revenue (through more optimizations), the additional revenue is worth more. Just running Facebook, Instagram & Co as a platform would probably be much cheaper than $8 per user.

Absolutely. Profligacy is often the rational course in a capitalist system.

That's assuming you have the add inventory a some point reducing costs make sense

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

#215

Post by kjaftaedi » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

isatty wrote: post #213

kjaftaedi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have experience on their VM's and have only used the dedicates to host personal projects/and non critical infrastructure. However, you should be treating your VMs as disposable and not as pets.

Imagine running a database in the cloud and someone deletes all of the database nodes in the cluster, all of your data, and your backups of the data.

VMs can be disposable, but if you have data you want to keep, you should have a second copy hosted by a separate organization .. well that was my lesson anyway.

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

#216

Post by chmod775 » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

maxk42 wrote: post #89

senko wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you support 4 million monthly visitors on a media site, and have multiple EC2 instances running, I'd love to see a cost breakdown structure, because in my (obviously incomplete and possibly naive) calculations, the bandwidth alone would cost more than $200/mo.

CloudFlare covers the media bandwidth costs for a mere $20 / month. The uploading and media conversion is the difficult and costly (in terms of CPU) portion.

>CloudFlare covers the media bandwidth costs for a mere $20 / month.

Your media files must be extremely small.

I'm guessing they're less than 20MB on average, because a) CF hasn't shown you the door yet b) they don't even cache anything bigger than half a gigabyte.

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

#217

Post by marsdepinski » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

During the dotcom days, we hosted sites like this on a home dsl connection on a single desktop machine and got people to pay for that.

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

#218

Post by bdcravens » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

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.

User count matters less than the amount of data and the amount of processing power required per user. Web servers are extremely efficient, so if most of that occurs within the context of requests, it's easy.

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

#219

Post by CryoLogic » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

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.

Depends on the type of web app. https://anim8.io - a site for hobby animators could never run on a $10VPS.

The bandwidth usage is just way too high and video compression requires GPU compute.

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

#220

Post by octabond » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

This is one of the most difficult things to get when building your startup. At the beginning you have no way of getting accurate costs, and clearly, there's no one-size-fits-all approach for this.

Its just trial and error