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Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

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21–30 of 91 posts

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#21
E5-2637 (32nm) is from 2012, I can not encourage people enough to buy the last 1151 Xeons or 8 core Atom on Mini-ITX SuperMicro motherboard (might be hard to find new soon): In particular I have E-2124 (2018), E-2224 (2019) and A2SDi-8C-HLN4F (2017); all 14nm, those you'll probably never have to replace for peak performance... the only question is if you will be able to afford powering them without revenues (75W/25W)...

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#22
post #13
post #7

I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end. From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000/month (6M requests).

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

Then why do you refer them as "best practice", can we use "common practice" instead?

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#23
post #18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

I lol-ed at this. A few years ago, someone said it runs as a single process on 1 core and use no database, everything is written to filesystem.

Two years ago I emailed HN to ask why favoriting posts is rate limited. Got the reply, "HN's main software runs on a single core."

They also said they are working on an overhaul of Arc and HN, which will massively improve performance.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#24
post #13
post #7

I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end. From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000/month (6M requests).

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

But look how big the team is! Must be pretty important.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#25
post #13
post #7

I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end. From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000/month (6M requests).

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

Not complex enough. Reckon you could easily fit in a few more steps there.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#27
post #13
post #7

I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end. From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000/month (6M requests).

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

Best practices align with scale. Technologists rush to implement the shiny shiny stuff you mentioned, but in most cases simplicity is the best solution until there is an actual scale problem to address.

That said, I bet at HN scale, it could be cloud-hosted pretty cheaply with ECS/Cloudfront. Maybe even just in S3 with a small RDS instance. Or in cloudflare as was discussed.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#28
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

Then why do you refer them as "best practice", can we use "common practice" instead?

There's a Dilbert (rather than an xkcd for that).

When everything is described by a superlative, really, it's just 'average'.

Sites like Trip Advisor or Amazon, or anything with a rating system. The "average" person nearly always puts 4 or 5 stars for average products or establishments.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#29
post #13
post #7

I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end. From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000/month (6M requests).

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

It's curious how "best practices" would cost ~10x and require 5 devops.

HN is crazy simple. Even $500/m sounds a bit high imo.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#30
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

Then why do you refer them as "best practice", can we use "common practice" instead?

In some circles of our buzz-word fuelled world what is considered “best practise” amongst risk-averse management is “what everyone else is already doing”. Anything else is too different: if it is such a good idea not to over-engineer, why is everyone else over-engineering?
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