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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

#281
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Exactly that! I always tell that customers and their response is: -But google/facebook/amazon... -But uptime needs to be 99.999 -But everyone uses cloud Most businesses are not a trading-market, have less then 100 peoples (aka you are probably not another amazon), and no bonus using a cloud/kubernetes etc. But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;)

Get two servers, stick them in different cities. $4k a month and you have resilience. $6k a month and you have resilience and double your throughout. Some stuff makes sense to put on iaas, dns often does for example.

4k/mnt for 2 Servers? That's a little bit to much, 200euro for two servers at hetzner is perfectly fine ;)

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://loader.io is a nice tool for that

Legend, thanks!

Wow, really glad I ran this tool.

Looks like with some dead basic optimisations (free versions of WP Fastest Cache and Autoptimise), my Wordpress site can handle around 1500 requests per second on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS before it starts to slow down.

On the old site, running on a shared host with less optimisations it would crap out at less than 10!

Seems like I don't need to worry about this after all.

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

#283

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!

It is indeed tiny. The backend for my app currently handles 500 qps for 300$ in GCP. I guess traffic is the biggest chunk for OP.

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

#284
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No it’s not. 2 qps is pitiful. If anything $400 is crazy expensive. I guess most of it goes to traffic/storage costs, otherwise they are being ripped off.

According to the blog post half the money goes to their CDN (Cloudflare) which is a good decision. And about $100 for the database hosting.

I don't think they are overpaying for what they are getting. $400 is not a lot for a proper site that serves a lot of bytes. I just don't think it's that impressive either -- it's just yet another website serving static assets through a CDN, with low QPS too, so I don't see why it's noteworthy.

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

#285
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any single one of those arguments is cargo-cult actually, isn't it? All means, no end.

Well most of them are Non IT businesses, so they just know what peers/family etc told them what todo (or what they do), then read some (oneside-)sponsored media and now they ~know whats best, it's Azure with WindowsServerDatacenter-edition, SQLServer-enterprise and McAffee antivirus ;) but who can be mad about it? It's just not their field of expertise or even interest.

fair enough, however they juggle the buzzwords.

If they didn't but cared about their business (they know I hope) and make hard requirements to IT, that would help. IT should then come up with solutions to those real-world problems. We're not talking just about hobbyists, do we?

That's what Eric Evans talks about in DDD as I got it.

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

#286

Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. It cost less than $2K/Month. The cloud is crazy expensive. Private servers are beasts, and they are cheap. Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. You also don't have to maintain and debug a sy…

Not including extra human cost in the analysis is just disingenuous. I think to manage private servers of that size you would need at least two extra experts totalling at least $20k/month.

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

#287

Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. It cost less than $2K/Month. The cloud is crazy expensive. Private servers are beasts, and they are cheap. Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. You also don't have to maintain and debug a sy…

Not including extra human cost in the analysis is just disingenuous. I think to manage private servers of that size you would need at least two extra experts totalling at least $20k/month.

What?! Maybe if you hire SV-skilled engineers on location in Sillicon Valley, but you can easily serve 2GB/second (on infra worth $2K/month) with one sys-admin dealing with it, and for way less than a whopping $10k/month.

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

#288

Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. It cost less than $2K/Month. The cloud is crazy expensive. Private servers are beasts, and they are cheap. Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. You also don't have to maintain and debug a sy…

Not including extra human cost in the analysis is just disingenuous. I think to manage private servers of that size you would need at least two extra experts totalling at least $20k/month.

They didn’t mention a fleet size but 2GB/s is a single commodity server.

You don’t even need a single employee to manage a single server…

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One variable you miss is the price of your own time.

To pay USD $20 and unload a problem to some 3rd party service takes under 30min, while running a scalable, high performance web-server on low budget is hard and time consuming - even impossible for devs with no sufficient devops/admin skills, which is sadly a majority.

Back in the day, as a student with no money and a time to spare I used to do it all myself too, guerrilla style. Nowadays tinkering with my private servers would mean taking time from my real job, and that just doesn't make sense financially, my time is way more valuable and scarce now.

That's why we have the economy of specialists in the first place. One can do everything in DIY fashion, but in our civilization it's usually cheaper to hire a plumber's or carpenter's services than to invest in learning the skills, buying the tools and then doing it, if it's not your primary source of income. It's no different with CDN services.

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

#290

Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. It cost less than $2K/Month. The cloud is crazy expensive. Private servers are beasts, and they are cheap. Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. You also don't have to maintain and debug a sy…

Not including extra human cost in the analysis is just disingenuous. I think to manage private servers of that size you would need at least two extra experts totalling at least $20k/month.

How many DevOps do you need to manage your cloud? How much do they cost?
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