Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.polyhaven.com

261–270 of 426 posts

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

#261

When I see per month or per day stats I get suspicious. Let's say a month has 30 days -- 5 million views a months is 166,666k per day, 6944 per hour, 116 per minute, and ~1.92 per second. 1.92 qps. Of course it's not expensive, it's a tiny amount of traffic!

I know, but it is impressive that they are doing it for $400.

It's impressive it takes that much money to do almost no traffic.

A raspberry PI could handle the compute.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Anything over 100ms [1] is perceived as not-instant by a user. If you wait 2RTTs with 50ms per round trip, then you've already exceeded this threshold. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...

1.13 seconds to load https://www.google.co.uk/ (even after preloading it and agreeing to their popup)

3.44 seconds to do a search for "donkey"

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

#263
post #207

I handle ~150TB and 26M page views for ~$500 by simply renting a few dedicated servers at hetzner. And if I didn't need quite a lot of processing power (more than average website), it would be much lower. I only need so many servers for the CPU power, not traffic.

Any experience with other providers of dedicated servers, e.g. Digitalocean?

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

#264
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.…

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.

How would you define actually capable? I can find servers with recent Xeon processors, good amounts of RAM and NVMe SSD with a gig uplink for around the 100 dollar mark.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Market rate for a 10gbps port is now less than $1k/mo

Where? I'm talking about 10gbps transit.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Hetzner root servers, there is nothing else I know on the market that comes close in price/power ratio when you use the "Serverbörse". I run multiple low traffic websites, databases and a heavy traffic elk instance + my complete homelab in proxmox / docker for 48€ a month and there is even room for more. Highly recommended!

What is your strategy for dealing with server failure?

As long as you treat servers as cattle, you can use Hetzner's own load balancer service and then you don't have a SPOF that you manage yourself. Their LBs are advertised as redundant / fault tolerant.

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

#267
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This is not what 10gbps transit means.

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

#268

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…

> 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? My response may come off as rude, but that's not the intention. From the above quote you've vastly over simplified all but the most simplistic environments. Someone could run al…

I'm guessing they meant to write SPAs.

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

#269

> 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 o…

What is a good solution compared to firebase ? I mean for a new project, alone something like user handling, registration, email sending, recovering passwords seem to cost some effort. Also be able to react to events, is kind of trivial in firebase. So is it really a bad choise (for the beginning)? Later you can always try to optimize.

so the problem here is if you have all of those needs, then really soon in the life of the project you are going to need good tooling to handle them.

So choosing something which makes it "one-click" to set up but total madness to manage is a really short-term optimization, only worth it for a pure prototype which you will throw away no matter how successful.

If you know you need those things to reach success, then it is better to make the up-front investment to get good tools for those.

If you still want to go with a cloud provider, AWS Amplify has some interesting tooling. I've build products both against Amplify and Firestore (and Firebase). Yes, Firebase is a few days to a week faster to set up (integrated user management, as you say), but AWS gives more sophisticated control and is built around scripted deployments.

You pay for it, of course, and I'm not arguing AWS vs running your own server. I am saying if the choice is AWS or Firebase, that a few days researching the choice would give you knowledge you could use for launching the next 10 prototypes you have in mind.

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

#270

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…

80TB/mo is quite a bit beyond the generosity of GitHub pages

any source on that?
Post reply on HN