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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

#61

Post by metadat »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #56
metadat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be missing something, are you able to elaborate on how CentralizedPro Flare for $20 solves the OPs problems? I've accessed plenty of sites physically located in the USA from various EU countries, not to mention AUS and I didn't notice much difference as long as they had a good interconnect. Maybe not the best for YouTube, but there's only a few of those. Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal and fell for CF ear…

Are you referring to the linked article? It literally explains what Cloudflare does for them. Everything might make more sense if you visit their website: https://polyhaven.com/ It's not just a dumb, static file server. EDIT: The questions below are literally explained in the article, so I'm going to give up on this thread.

Yes, and if they could pay 1/20th of their current bill to solve it, I'm sure they would.

I feel like we're heading into the weeds. Do you get the broader point I'm trying to make?

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

#62

Post by jason0597 »

I often wonder why so many companies seem to spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on AWS services for their hosting. If most web apps nowadays are just CRUD apps, then why would you need to spend more than €300/month on hosting? All you'd need is data and the website itself, right?

I'm currently clicking through various European hosting services and they seem to offer great dedicated servers at good prices. I cannot wrap my head around these ridiculous costs I keep hearing about. A guy I know was telling me how they were spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on AWS at his company.

Is it because everyone is writing their stuff on node.js, putting 500kb of JS in every web page they serve, putting Docker everywhere when a chroot would suffice, microservices, Kubernetes, or hell even writing SAPs when we don't need them?

I am genuinely confused

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

#63

Post by PragmaticPulp »

willcipriano wrote: post #25

If you are worried about getting your blog post to the top of Reddit or Hacker News (I've never been there myself); you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. It's the Bart Simpson method of highly scalability[0], for static content you can have global datacenter coverage in a couple minutes or so if you u…

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular.

I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general.

$20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case.

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

#64

Post by PragmaticPulp »

mike_d wrote: post #60
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I serve >30TB/month off a Hetzner server with rotating rust drives for like $50/month You could probably do it with Cloudflare for a similar price, but that's not what this article is about. The article says that their Cloudflare (not Argo) bill is only $40/month, and that's only because they have two domains. It's $20/month per domain. The $400/month figure isn't just for static file hosting. It includes their API…

> They make a point to say that low-latency, global CDN is a priority for them Which, franky, is dumb. File downloads depend on throughput, not time to first byte like a small javascript file. Once bits start flowing it doesn't matter if they travel half way around the globe. It is like saying you are trying to optimize an ocean cargo ship for acceleration time.

> Which, franky, is dumb. File downloads depend on throughput, not time to first byte like a small javascript file. Once bits start flowing it doesn't matter if they travel half way around the globe.

Round-trip latency has a significant impact on TCP throughput. It's not just about time to first byte.

They're also not a static file serving website.

If they were just serving static files and they didn't care about latency, they could pay $20/month for Cloudflare Pro and be done with it.

I don't understand why you continue to ignore the fact that this for running a high-traffic, global, dynamic website, not just a static file server.

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

#65

Post by r1ch »

It's annoying how you have to work around Cloudflare's weird Argo pricing like this. Paying per GB for already-cached data that takes the same route as non-Argo traffic makes no sense.

I believe it's also against Cloudflare's TOS to use it as an asset-hosting platform.

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

#67

Post by metadat »

nrb wrote: post #54
metadat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they could deliver potentially ~300TB with a 1gbps unmetered link. Not that hard to come by, could even get to 3PB for $300/mo. Back in the day we used Texan Colo data centers with DrFTPD to do just this at massive scale. Bytes in, bytes out. Not a popular opinion here, but I firmly believe it's not necessary to play the CentralizedFlare game to get a winning outcome.

For the average person, why make it unnecessarily hard on yourself? If it’s not your core competency and unless you possess the vast breadth and depth of skills to dig yourself out if something goes wrong, it seems like a distraction at best and a fatal mistake at worst, with the end result of saving 1-2 engineer hours worth of money per month. For some self-hosting is a no-brainer, but I suspect that community is mu…

It seems disingenuous to count engineer hours at $200USD/hour for charitable donation-run projects. Is it charitable to funnel your donor money to CF? I'm sure CF is grateful for the donation..

Fact: Things break most often because of humans doing things - changes, like deployments and config modifications.

Set things up right to begin with, and in my experience you can leave them running for a long time without intervention.

Downvote all you like, but it's the truth.

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

#68

Post by lstodd »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58
est31 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 GB of RAM means a lot of ability to cache data in RAM, which the OS does already by default. It of course depends on the type of content you have but generally traffic follows a power law, so most content can be served from RAM directly. The write side I'm a bit more worried about, as e.g. SQLite issues a sync request on each transaction (not sure about the other SQL implementations, should be similar there tho),…

The article explains that they have database and API usage. You can't run a high-throughput database on spinning disks unless you disregard data integrity. It's not just a static fileserver, despite some of the comparisons in this thread.

Like SSDs bring any new angle to this.

> You can't run a high-throughput database on spinning disks unless you disregard data integrity

Of course you can. That's the way it was and still is done. I'd say one can't run a database with any data integrity unless there are disks spinning somewhere very near.

I'd take another box for like $40 there just for the replica, which would sit mostly idle anyways.

But piling on CDNs, clouds and variuos other opex and indeterminate risks instead of some thinking out of this little cloud shoebox is just baffling.

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

#69

Post by aasasd »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #66
IvanK_net wrote: post #51

I was running www.Photopea.com with 10M page views a month for $40 a year. Now, I upgraded to $60 a month. I never used any CDN.

Ever since MacOS broke Gimp I use Photopea regularly! Fantastic site!

Please tell more about this ‘MacOS broke Gimp’ thing, because it's the first time I hear of that and I'd like to dodge a firsthand experience.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #63
willcipriano wrote: post #25

If you are worried about getting your blog post to the top of Reddit or Hacker News (I've never been there myself); you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. It's the Bart Simpson method of highly scalability[0], for static content you can have global datacenter coverage in a couple minutes or so if you u…

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datace…

[deleted]
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