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We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

blog.polyhaven.com

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Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#31

Post by PragmaticPulp »

mike_d wrote: post #12

It is annoying that the answer is basically "we paid someone [Cloudflare] to do it." In light of that I decided to run some of my own numbers and figure it out. They are pushing about 245 Mbps out of Cloudflare (averaged over the month). Wholesale IP transit prices are anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per Mbps depending on volume. Cloudflare dumps 40% of their traffic over peering, putting their price at $14.70/mo.…

> A capable dedicated server with 2 TB of disk and 1 Gbps unlimited bandwidth will run about $30 in a major European metro, maybe double that for the US.

Not even close to comparable. I think you're ignoring all of the functions they're paying for. They're not just hosting a few files. Also, your "worst case" is literally the most optimistic best case for a standalone single server, which completely disregards any redundancy and assumes that the $30/month server is truly unlimited/unmetered in every way. That's not a good assumption.

Cloudflare is a global CDN that will be fast for everyone regardless of location and will soak up bursts of traffic with ease. It's also fast in a location-independent way, which won't be true for a single server in a single datacenter somewhere.

Finally, the amount of effort it takes to do this with Cloudflare is trivial. The amount of effort it would take to maintain and optimize a standalone solution is not negligible.

Cloudflare seems like a very good deal to me, unless you value your time at $0 and you have access to these truly unlimited, high-performance $30/month servers.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#32

Post by mike_d »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #26

Question: I want to make a live video streaming website a la Twitch.tv. How much would CloudFlare charge me to stream 8 Mbps to ~80,000 viewers for 4 hours?

Almost $20,000.

19,200,000 minutes at $1 per 1,000 minutes. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001645087...

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#33

Post by PragmaticPulp »

mike_d wrote: post #27
walrus01 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An actually capable dedicated bare metal server with a good amount of RAM, CPU and disk, and 1Gbps will be more like $250-300/mo USD. This would be approximately equivalent in spec to what you could build for $2500 purchase cost if buying a 1U machine and colocating itself. For 30 bucks a month you'll get something very old and weak.

The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. We figured out how to do this with "old and weak" hardware in the 90s. Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59

> The bulk of the traffic is serving static files.

The bulk of the data transferring is static files because they're hosting large assets, but the rest of the article is about their API, database, etc.

A single server in a single datacenter isn't comparable to a global CDN. They made it clear in the article that they value global latency, and they're willing to pay more for it.

> Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59

That has mechanical spinning hard disks and a CPU that was released literally a decade ago.

You're not going to replace Cloudflare, Firebase, their API server, and a global CDN with a single 10-year old machine serving files from a mechanical spinning hard disk, hosted by a company that almost nobody has heard of.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#34

Post by itsdrewmiller »

ghostly_s wrote: post #13
jaytaylor wrote: post #8

How do 5M page views consume 80TB of traffic? That sounded like a lot, but calculates out to 1,600KB per page view. That's a lot of JS and images on every page :) A few years ago when I hosted what felt to me like a popular site, I was serving serving > 150K page views a month from a 1.5Mbps adsl uplink. With that said, back then you could gzip everything and there was no letsencrypt or CloudFlare walls across the bo…

Did you even look at the article? They operate a digital asset store.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#35

Post by mike_d »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33
mike_d wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. We figured out how to do this with "old and weak" hardware in the 90s. Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59

> The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. The bulk of the data transferring is static files because they're hosting large assets, but the rest of the article is about their API, database, etc. A single server in a single datacenter isn't comparable to a global CDN. They made it clear in the article that they value global latency, and they're willing to pay more for it. > Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM,…

Yahoo, Google, and eBay were built with gasp spinning hard disks.

But fine, if you don't believe it I will happily extend an invitation to come see in person my racks of spinning rust and 10 year old servers in Los Angeles or Fremont that are running services that are used by millions of end users. My email is in my profile.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#37

Post by busymom0 »

mike_d wrote: post #32
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #26

Question: I want to make a live video streaming website a la Twitch.tv. How much would CloudFlare charge me to stream 8 Mbps to ~80,000 viewers for 4 hours?

Almost $20,000. 19,200,000 minutes at $1 per 1,000 minutes. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001645087...

There's probably some bulk deals if you get in touch with their sales team?

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#38

Post by PragmaticPulp »

mike_d wrote: post #35
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. The bulk of the data transferring is static files because they're hosting large assets, but the rest of the article is about their API, database, etc. A single server in a single datacenter isn't comparable to a global CDN. They made it clear in the article that they value global latency, and they're willing to pay more for it. > Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM,…

Yahoo, Google, and eBay were built with gasp spinning hard disks. But fine, if you don't believe it I will happily extend an invitation to come see in person my racks of spinning rust and 10 year old servers in Los Angeles or Fremont that are running services that are used by millions of end users. My email is in my profile.

> Yahoo, Google, and eBay were built with gasp spinning hard disks.

Which they ditched as soon as physically possible. The internet has changed a lot since then. That much should be obvious.

You can't reduce this article to "millions of end users" and then equate it with every other service. There's more to this article/service than you're suggesting, and there's more to a website than just users/month.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#39

Post by sroussey »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33
mike_d wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. We figured out how to do this with "old and weak" hardware in the 90s. Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59

> The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. The bulk of the data transferring is static files because they're hosting large assets, but the rest of the article is about their API, database, etc. A single server in a single datacenter isn't comparable to a global CDN. They made it clear in the article that they value global latency, and they're willing to pay more for it. > Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM,…

Why not? We did that for years if not decades.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#40

Post by herpderperator »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33
mike_d wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. We figured out how to do this with "old and weak" hardware in the 90s. Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59

> The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. The bulk of the data transferring is static files because they're hosting large assets, but the rest of the article is about their API, database, etc. A single server in a single datacenter isn't comparable to a global CDN. They made it clear in the article that they value global latency, and they're willing to pay more for it. > Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM,…

What's wrong with a spinning hard disk? The files are super easy to read, we're talking milliseconds, and once done it stays in the page cache in RAM... that completely negates any SSD advantage. SSDs have little to no benefit in serving static files.

If you're really strict on this it's trivial to preload these files in RAM after compiling your assets so you don't have to wait for a request.

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