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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

#181

Post by anaganisk »

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…

$20 a month for a Static site? that feels like a first world problem. I feel like everything is over engineered, unless you need subsecond delivery of your assets which are very huge, cdn doesn’t even makes sense. For a blog whats the point, your site is not going to receive heavy traffic every hour from global locations everyday. If you are concerned about returning users cache your assets on their machine. If your site is video heavy I can understand. I run a Django site for a zoo on a $10 instance, I have 2 others running on same instance. Never had issue with page speed even on 2G or under load my instance didn’t suffer. My storage on s3 is proxied via Nginx and cached on user device and in Nginx, I never even had a downtime due to traffic. I use fail2ban for basic protection. If it comes to DDOS im behind cloudflare free tier. $20 per month for a blog? Lol.

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

#182

Post by nrb »

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…

> Is it charitable to funnel your donor money to CF? I'm sure CF is grateful for the donation..

Is the job getting done for the donors? I bet they don’t care about $300 if it means the website is highly available and the maintainer isn’t burned out from giving away $200/hr of opportunity cost all the time.

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

Totally agree, and sometimes success in your project forces your hand as you are pressed to add functionality or need to scale. If you can guarantee that you’re doing this work once, ignoring hardware failure or scaling, the scales may very well tip toward self-managed.

For a vast majority of projects, I think it just plainly makes sense to go this route, hence the success of these centralized hosts. It is the pragmatic option.

PS. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry you’re being downvoted simply for having an viewpoint that others disagree with.

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

#183

Post by Karrot_Kream »

metadat wrote: post #77
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why not go back to the $40/month plan and spend $20/month on Cloudflare Pro? I was able to load photopea.com in about 5000ms, uncached. That's not terrible, but it was slow enough that I wondered for a few seconds if the site was broken. A CDN would cut that load time massively, and it…

Honest question: Why is everyone pushing CentralizedFlare pro so hard in this thread?

Because the linked article is about Cloudflare? It's like asking why a comment thread on an article talking about apples is discussing apples. Or are you asking why so many people are _pro_ Cloudflare?

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

#184

Post by throw14082020 »

anaganisk wrote: post #181
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…

$20 a month for a Static site? that feels like a first world problem. I feel like everything is over engineered, unless you need subsecond delivery of your assets which are very huge, cdn doesn’t even makes sense. For a blog whats the point, your site is not going to receive heavy traffic every hour from global locations everyday. If you are concerned about returning users cache your assets on their machine. If your…

You missed the point, it's "pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular". There is a generous free tier, and for years I have paid nothing to Cloudflare, but I serve 2GB total every month to visitors, YMMV.

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

#185

Post by PragmaticPulp »

jason0597 wrote: post #62

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…

> 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?

If you're building a basic CRUD app and you have low traffic numbers, you don't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on AWS.

But it's not as simple as picking a dedicated server, setting it up, and hoping for the best. At minimum you need periodic backups, testing and staging environments, solutions for rate-limiting your API, and so on.

And the "everything is just a CRUD app" meme is just that: a meme. Usually engineers who repeat this have only ever worked on simple CRUD apps, so they don't understand what it's like to work on anything different.

> 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.

If you're working on the types of problems that are a good fit for setting up a single dedicated server on a random hosting provider, you're not working on the same types of problems that necessitate $10K AWS bills.

> I am genuinely confused

I've worked on projects with $10K+ monthly AWS bills. It wasn't node.js or Docker or Kubernetes. It was the sheer volume of connections we had to maintain and data we had to process.

But even if we could reduce our $10K/month AWS bill to $1000/month with a lot of engineering effort and manual management of our own servers, what would we gain? If I had to hire a single additional devops person or engineer to help manage this custom solution, the entire savings would be wiped out. And then some!

Wasting AWS resources isn't smart, but trying to DIY your solution to everything rarely makes financial sense when you look at how much engineering effort it takes and how much engineers cost. If I can spend $10K/month to avoid hiring 1 additional engineer, it's a financial win. I do not care if someone thinks they can do the same thing in $1K/month with endless amounts of custom setup and maintenance. I don't want it.

It also reduces the number of moving pieces that we have to manage manually, which reduces the on-call burden, which keeps people happier.

I really don't understand the anti-cloud hate on HN. It doesn't mirror the real engineering world at all.

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

#186

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #169
nemothekid wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As opposed to the CEO of Amazon/Rackspace/your favorite host here who doesn't have the ability to terminate your account? What are you saying? Or are there other non-profit web hosts and CDNs that I missed? If you have a personal axe to grind against the CEO of Cloudfla…

Superkuh's point is that depending on any single service to protect/host/route your content is setting up oneself up to be Parler'd or 8chan'd. It doesn't matter how good the technology. If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed. There's.no need to grind an axe to observe how past actions have set the course for the future, perhaps for t…

It's a caching layer. If you're deplatformed from your caching service, you still have the backing service.

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

#187

Post by the_duke »

Jamie9912 wrote: post #101
technotarek wrote: post #49

We have an incredibly similar stack for attic.city, aside from the application layer. We lean heavily on CF (edge caching, Argo and page rules). But we’ve recently changed our image assets from S3 to CF R2. Anyone else put that side by side with Bunny?

What? how do you have access to R2?

It's in private beta.

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

#188

Post by throw14082020 »

> To avoid this problem in the future, I decided to splurge a bit and go for a cloud solution where I wouldn’t have to worry about reliability, performance, scaling or integrity ever again: Google Firestore.

> Google Firebase is nice and convenient, but it is quite expensive. We could investigate some other managed database options in future.

I've only seen people get annoyed with Firestore over time, and migrating out of it. People do end up worrying. At first, They seem to choose Firestore because it's strongly marketed and seems suitable for a new project. And then data modeling, high prices or scalability becomes a problem.

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

#189

Post by anaganisk »

throw14082020 wrote: post #184
anaganisk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20 a month for a Static site? that feels like a first world problem. I feel like everything is over engineered, unless you need subsecond delivery of your assets which are very huge, cdn doesn’t even makes sense. For a blog whats the point, your site is not going to receive heavy traffic every hour from global locations everyday. If you are concerned about returning users cache your assets on their machine. If your…

You missed the point, it's "pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular". There is a generous free tier, and for years I have paid nothing to Cloudflare, but I serve 2GB total every month to visitors, YMMV.

No I didn’t miss the point, $20 is weeks worth of meal in majority of countries. People from those countries run successful blogs without paying a penny to cloudlfare. I serve much more than 2GB per month without all that on a dynamic site. Paying cloudlfare for that is like putting a tarp over a dumpster fire to quickly hide it. I would rather think why my static site fails like shit when it doesn’t even need server side processing and correct it. I’m not saying cloudflare/CDN is useless, it shines when you are serving huge assets every hour to lot of people globally, or want to secure from bot traffic, or other useful features it provides. Heck you could even host a static site on s3 or netlify for free and answer all the traffic in the world. Remember Google returned subsecond results much before cloudflare or global CDNs were in place.

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

#190

Post by nemothekid »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #169
nemothekid wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As opposed to the CEO of Amazon/Rackspace/your favorite host here who doesn't have the ability to terminate your account? What are you saying? Or are there other non-profit web hosts and CDNs that I missed? If you have a personal axe to grind against the CEO of Cloudfla…

Superkuh's point is that depending on any single service to protect/host/route your content is setting up oneself up to be Parler'd or 8chan'd. It doesn't matter how good the technology. If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed. There's.no need to grind an axe to observe how past actions have set the course for the future, perhaps for t…

>If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed.

Again, _as opposed to what_? Are you saying polyhaven should go multi-cloud and spend triple what they need? You aren't actually presenting any real solutions, you are just complaining about the cloudflare ceo.

I'm a guy who wants to host a service. You are telling me Cloudflare bad. What is the alternative, and how do I ensure the CEO of that service doesn't null route me?

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