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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

#341

Post by southerntofu »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #180
bawolff wrote: post #150

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…

> 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 everyon…

With some browser security policy that blocks part of the download, the homepage www.photopea.com clocks in at 3.80MB (so it should be much higher in practice). In this case, it's mostly JS, so designing your website properly (without JS, especially if the app itself is wasm not JS) would have much better savings than moving to CloudFlare CDN.

A CDN is more times than not the wrong answer to a real problem. Shave off your website and consider content-addressed protocols for big static asset download (like the textures from the article). If you run your website as a lightweight glorified Bittorrent index you'll notice your costs are suddenly a lot less, and you can still have a smaller "Download over the web" button as fallback.

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

#342

Post by richardwhiuk »

andyp-kw wrote: post #321
richardwhiuk wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impressive it takes that much money to do almost no traffic. A raspberry PI could handle the compute.

Only if the traffic is evenly distributed during the day. Which it's almost certainly not.

The traffic graphs in their blog look pretty stable. Maybe 1.5x, but not hugely uneven.

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

#343

Post by PragmaticPulp »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #337
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire team is composed of half of one dev. Who is on-call 24/7/365, never takes vacation ever, and is always available to fix the website? It’s weird how much HN hates jobs with on-call requirements, but every time cloud services come up the solutions always involve forcing someone to be permanently on call to save a few hundred dollars per month in hosting costs.

Nobody is on call 24H. If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. The world doesn't stop because a streaming service is down for a few hours. It's not a medical service, or something thousands of businesses rely on. It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day because they had to wait until they could access new content. It's ok.

> Nobody is on call 24H.

This one dev is literally on call 365 days a year and can never be away from a computer on vacation. If he leaves, the project has no one.

How is that not a problem? Surely you can see that this isn’t reasonable for anyone who wants to run a business, or any employee who doesn’t want the website to be their life.

> If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning.

> It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day

If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal and you don’t care about lost revenue, then it’s not really a valid comparison to the typical business website.

Your situation is unique, not a model by which other companies should follow.

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

#344

Post by ziggus »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #286
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #226

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 do you imagine these experts would do? Rebuild the servers from raw materials each month, and hand-code all software in ASM weekly?

In the real world, once most hosting platforms are up and running, the maintenance overhead is pretty low.

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

#345

Post by kijin »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #343
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is on call 24H. If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. The world doesn't stop because a streaming service is down for a few hours. It's not a medical service, or something thousands of businesses rely on. It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day because they had to wait until they could access new content. It's ok.

> Nobody is on call 24H. This one dev is literally on call 365 days a year and can never be away from a computer on vacation. If he leaves, the project has no one. How is that not a problem? Surely you can see that this isn’t reasonable for anyone who wants to run a business, or any employee who doesn’t want the website to be their life. > If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the mo…

You can host on AWS and still get hours-long downtime, as has happened recently.

Whether the cost of trying to add another 9 to your uptime is worth the marginal benefit is for each company to decide. Each 9 gets exponentially more expensive. A lot of companies who think otherwise actually can afford (and will, sooner or later, be forced) to be down once in a while.

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

#346

Post by halilduygulu »

SergeAx wrote: post #319
hansel_der wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the whole point of vm/container is to enable "servers as cattle"

Yes, but "Serverbörse" machines are very non-uniform, which may be bad for load balancing. See yourself: https://www.hetzner.com/sb

Still you can get a nice server with i7 cpu 32gb memory with 20tb traffic for ~28 euro, vat incl. This is super competitive even with DO or others.

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

#347

Post by wongarsu »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #343
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is on call 24H. If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. The world doesn't stop because a streaming service is down for a few hours. It's not a medical service, or something thousands of businesses rely on. It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day because they had to wait until they could access new content. It's ok.

> Nobody is on call 24H. This one dev is literally on call 365 days a year and can never be away from a computer on vacation. If he leaves, the project has no one. How is that not a problem? Surely you can see that this isn’t reasonable for anyone who wants to run a business, or any employee who doesn’t want the website to be their life. > If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the mo…

He never said they don't care about lost revenue. I am willing to guess they considered the lost revenue, weighed it against the cost of having someone on-call 24/7, and considered that the lost revenue was cheaper.

If you look at how frequently sites like Reddit used to have downtime, it doesn't seem to matter too much for consumer products. Having half a day downtime once a year might be completely acceptable.

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

#348

Post by bserge »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #337
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire team is composed of half of one dev. Who is on-call 24/7/365, never takes vacation ever, and is always available to fix the website? It’s weird how much HN hates jobs with on-call requirements, but every time cloud services come up the solutions always involve forcing someone to be permanently on call to save a few hundred dollars per month in hosting costs.

Nobody is on call 24H. If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. The world doesn't stop because a streaming service is down for a few hours. It's not a medical service, or something thousands of businesses rely on. It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day because they had to wait until they could access new content. It's ok.

No post body was provided.

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

#349

Post by judofyr »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #343
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is on call 24H. If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. The world doesn't stop because a streaming service is down for a few hours. It's not a medical service, or something thousands of businesses rely on. It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day because they had to wait until they could access new content. It's ok.

> Nobody is on call 24H. This one dev is literally on call 365 days a year and can never be away from a computer on vacation. If he leaves, the project has no one. How is that not a problem? Surely you can see that this isn’t reasonable for anyone who wants to run a business, or any employee who doesn’t want the website to be their life. > If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the mo…

> If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal and you don’t care about lost revenue, then it’s not really a valid comparison to the typical business website.

I think you're severely underestimating how many businesses make a significant amount of money from their website, but doesn't actually have full-time developer available. An extended outage would cause significant revenue loss, but it's typically not a problem because outages are surprisingly rare when you (1) have a very stable traffic pattern and (2) you don't spend a lot of time adding features and refactoring. Pretty much every cloud outage we've seen was caused by a human configuration error, not fault machines.

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

#350

Post by PragmaticPulp »

judofyr wrote: post #349
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is on call 24H. This one dev is literally on call 365 days a year and can never be away from a computer on vacation. If he leaves, the project has no one. How is that not a problem? Surely you can see that this isn’t reasonable for anyone who wants to run a business, or any employee who doesn’t want the website to be their life. > If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the mo…

> If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal and you don’t care about lost revenue, then it’s not really a valid comparison to the typical business website. I think you're severely underestimating how many businesses make a significant amount of money from their website, but doesn't actually have full-time developer available. An extended outage would cause significant revenue loss, but it's t…

> I think you're severely underestimating how many businesses make a significant amount of money from their website, but doesn't actually have full-time developer available.

No, I’m well aware. But there’s a simple solution to this problem: Don’t try to run and maintain your own servers. Pay a little extra to use cloud hosting and let it be someone else’s problem.

I take issue with these calls to setup and maintain your own custom solutions and servers, while also suggesting that the cost of engineering and maintaining such a custom setup should be ignored.

Running your own servers and not having developers is a recipe for an endless stream of contracting invoices that are going to cost far, far more than just using a hosted cloud solution.

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