We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400 • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by goldbattle » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:26 AM UTC

My thought is why don't the authors use github pages to host their static site with their links to a dedicated server with an unmetered link since their whole project is CC0. Downloading assets doesn't need to be low latency, thus I don't think the caching spatially near the user is important. Having a user login for patreon is something that would be missing and require some more thought I admit.

I think quite a lot of other people have mentioned in the thread that they are getting a lot of other "benefits" from using multiple services, but I don't see how these help solve the problem of data delivery besides taking advantage of the Cloudflare + Backblaze alliance which is $31 if their main website is a static one.

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

#172

Post by miyuru » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:31 AM UTC

mayli wrote: post #132

ignoramous wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cause it solves real issues for dirt cheap... One doesn't even need pro . In our use, Cloudflare's pages.dev and workers.dev serves single-digit TB traffic with triple-digit million hits at $30/mo. We pay $0/mo for origin servers since there aren't any.

Unique Visitors 358.45k, Total Requests 22.13M, Total Data Served 3 TB from cloudflare + a scaleway stardust for 1$ per mo.

IPv6 only stardust I am guessing?

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

#173

Post by Karrot_Kream » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:33 AM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #109

ibic wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I’m still wrapping my head reading these comments, “bizarre” is the word I was looking for.

Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. "Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to mi…

Dealing with fraud and abuse has _long_ been a centralizing force on the internet. Think about email which is the way it is largely because of spam. We need to structurally stop spam not just shame people from embracing solutions that make their life easier.

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

#174

Post by lelandfe » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:34 AM UTC

helsontaveras18 wrote: post #125

This website is one of the fastest web pages I’ve ever used. Although it’s simple, it immediately loads pages and pages of images. Like in a flash. I’m on mobile web and it’s such a snappy experience.

If Poly Haven is reading this: you nearly have an amazing FCP on the models browser but the external normalize.css file is killing you.[0] Self-hosting would drastically improve your 75p paint time.

I'd also encourage you load your fonts late via JS. Your main JS package competes right now with WOFF files from Google Fonts for priority and there's no need for that.

[0] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/220106_BiDc42_428a3caec56...

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

#175

Post by bryans » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:34 AM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #72

NorwegianDude wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wholesale IP transit prices are anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per Mbps depending on volume. 10 cents is far from the lower end for high quality IP transit. Cloudflare doesn't pay anywhere near $14.70/mo for 80 TB/mo. Even I spend much less than that on 80 TB in a month. On top of that, peering makes it even cheaper for Cloudflare, as you said. Cloudflare is very likely using peering for much more than 40 % of…

Cloudflare might not pay that on a per TB basis, but where are you getting 10 gige transit for under $1k??

Linode offers a 50 dCPU with 10Gbps out for $960. Or if you just need the bandwidth and don't need the CPU power, you can combine three $30 servers with 4Gbps each, and put them behind a $10 load balancer, for a total of 12Gbps out at $100/mo.

https://www.linode.com/pricing/

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

#176

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:35 AM UTC

Isn't this like 2 requests per second?

That's massively overpriced, with current prices you should fit into a 5 dollar budget.

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

#177

Post by youngtaff » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

chx wrote: post #73

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

While you are right CF provides a lot more, it really must be noted that Hetzner SB servers start at 28 EUR and they _do_ come with unlimited bandwidth and 2 x 3TB disks. For 30 EUR you can get a E3-1245 with 2x4TB disk. Just noting.

Yeh, but that Hetzner server is only in one location so doesn’t reduce the RTT between your visitor’s and your server (particularly for visitors who are far away)

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

#178

Post by jijji » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

I like the idea of cloudflare as a OSPF style file cache, but what about putting 80TB in a colo-facility on a 1U box and paying $80/month to host that yourself? is it cheaper to use Amazon S3?

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

#179

Post by chillfox » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

metadat wrote: post #67

nrb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

I guess the question is what do you consider a long time?

RedHat usually break setups every 3-4 years which I personally consider way to frequent.

If I configure a server with automatic updates then I would like it to run with very little maintenance for at least a decade and a long time would be two plus decades.

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

#180

Post by PragmaticPulp » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:50 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #150

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of th…

> Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference?

The common mistake is to pick a server geographically close to yourself, only access it from low-latency connections, and then assume that everyone in the world is seeing the same thing.

Or to only visit your own site with everything already in the browser cache. If you're not seeing cold start loads, you're not seeing what every new visitor to your website is seeing.

Consider the Photopea.com website. The author explained in a comment below that he spends $60/month to host the site without a CDN. Several of us loaded the site and it took 2.5 - 5.0 seconds to load. He could sign up for a cheap Cloudflare account, reduce the size of his server (due to caching), and the load times for everyone would drop by a significant amount.

If you're hosting simple, static content like a blog for an audience that doesn't care about load times, then of course nothing matters. But for modern, content-rich websites (photos especially) it can actually be a substantial improvement to add a CDN even if you have a single fast server. You may not see it, but visitors from distant locations definitely will see a difference.