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

#361

Post by BiteCode_dev » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #350

judofyr wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

> pay a little extra

The whole idea is that it's not a little extra, but 2 orders of magnitude.

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

#362

Post by jerf » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:41 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #333

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A python that knows python and linux is enough to support the up time needs and evolutions of this particular product. Actually a part time one. The entire team is composed of half of one dev. I'm 100% sure it's way cheaper than anybody that has AWS on resume. Of course, some things have to give, like the global CND, and some data guarantees. Everything is a compromise. It's all depend of what is important for your p…

> 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.

"forcing someone to be permanently on call"

The company I work for has a lot of stuff in the cloud. We seem to have quite a few position's worth of people permanently on call.

The percentage of "data center"-type on-call situations has perhaps gone down somewhat since moving into the cloud, but it has not gone to zero, and it was never the majority of problems anyhow.

It seems like you're sneaking the idea in that if they would just pay a lot more money, the person on call wouldn't have to be on call. I'd like to know what cloud you're using, because it doesn't seem to be any of the ones I know of. If your service is critical to your business or project, you've got someone on some sort of call (maybe not overnight call, which is the really rough bit), period, or you've got a business that can disappear at any second.

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

#363

Post by BiteCode_dev » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #359

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep moving the goal post. It seems it's criminal to run a service on the cheap, there must be a terrible human being behing it. Well no, the dev is not attached 365 days on its computer. A freelancer is hired part time for the duration of the vaccations. It cost a full dev salary for one month, taking in consideration training time, that's all. > If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal…

> A freelancer is hired part time for the duration of the vaccations. It cost a full dev salary for one month, taking in consideration training time, that's all. You pay a full dev salary for one month every time someone wants to take a break? It’s baffling that anyone can read an article about someone spending $400/month on cloud services and then start proposing things like this as an alternative. Engineering labor…

One month part time once a year as an additional cost is way, way cheaper than anything else.

> Cloud is surprisingly cheap once you factor in engineering costs.

No, it's not, since you need somebody qualified to operate it. And such qualificatied employees is very expensive. And you will need them on call anyway, since it will break, just in different way than a bunch of private servers.

I'd argue the cloud would be more expensive, even if hosting were not, because you need a more expensive team to run it.

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

#364

Post by BiteCode_dev » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #352

mjburgess wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One has to presume that they have priced this and found the non-cloud version over-all cheaper. Labour isnt expensive if you're operating towards a minimum needed to function, and your systems are sufficiently operationally stable.

> Labour isnt expensive… Engineering labor is definitely expensive. The entire $400/month bill for this linked website will only get you 2-3 hours of consulting time. They’re getting an enormous value by just offloading the work to someone else and not having to worry about it.

That is based on the id a cloud base service would not need a team to make it work.

I'd argue it actually need a more expensive team.

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

#365

Post by wongarsu » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #350

judofyr wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

I'd be on board with "pay a little extra to rent dedicated servers", but "move to one of the big-three cloud providers" doesn't sound like a sound financial decision for the case presented.

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

#366

Post by Melkman » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #318

capableweb wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> with one sys-admin dealing with it, And if that one sys-admin wants to go on vacation? Or travel away from a computer? Or takes another job? You can never have “just one” admin handling a server and being on-call 24/7. Would you really want a job where you could never, ever be away from a computer because you’re the only on-call person? This doesn’t work.

Why would it be necessary to have an engineer on call 24/7 ? If you do your risk calculations and an outage of 12 hours is acceptable in the expected frequency you just let the engineer have a nice evening and night an deal with the outage in the morning. If outages are only to be expected once a year an you can tolerate 48 hours of outage you don't need any on call engineer. Most outages are cause by changes. You can test those and plan putting these in production and have elevated monitoring after this to catch problems early. Only problem remaining is hardware outages. And those are very rare as long as you do decent lifecycle maintenance. As others said before. Not everyone is Google or Amazon and needs 99,999% uptime.

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

#367

Post by ThinkBeat » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

I dont understand this entirely . A lot of the article is spent talking about how great and fast Cloudflare is.

Then at the end he says he uses Bunny as the CDN for images. Why use Bunny instead of Cloudflare? One more moving part.

I presume it is cost related?

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

#368

Post by anatolinicolae » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:20 PM UTC

xurukefi wrote: post #353

> This website blog.polyhaven.com/how-we-handle-80tb-and-5m-page-views-a-month-for-under-400/ is currently offline. Cloudflare's Always Online™ shows a snapshot of this web page from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. To check for the live version, click Refresh. oh the irony

Aged well I see...

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

#369

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #350

judofyr wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

[deleted]

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

#370

Post by tyingq » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:28 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #159

eastdakota wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, because we're hiring like crazy to build new things. As we said during our last earnings call, we intend to stay at break even as long as we can achieve extraordinary revenue growth and continue to deliver innovative new products. The more relevant number for this comparison would be our gross margin — much we have to spend on things like bandwidth and servers to service our customers divided by the revenue tho…

It's super nice that you're here and your transparency is appreciated, but don't waste time in people like GP. Just walk your way and don't mind the naysayers. My two cents from a regular guy to a billionaire, :).

>don't mind the naysayers

Noting they are operating at a slight loss, during a period where they want to drive growth, isn't "naysaying". The question is whether the current pricing is tied at all to the "operating at a slight loss". He replied to say it mostly wasn't.

Remember, for example, when Uber rides were really cheap?