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

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 91 posts

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

#31
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.

Is that supposed to be a good thing?

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

#32
post #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)…

Why get those instead of modern Ryzens that are much faster at the same power levels?

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

#35
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dig a news.ycombinator.com +short 209.216.230.240 Not Cloudflare's address.

They had a hardware failure this year and were for a really short time on a cloud instance and behind cloudflare.

While most of your statement is true, it was direct-from-AWS (at least from my testing, so I'm not sure if some users were routed through Cloudflare).

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

#36
post #31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that supposed to be a good thing?

If it provides the correct features and runs correctly, simpler is better. To me, simpler to run, understand, backup, deploy, recover goes in the right direction.

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

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

With that pattern I always go with: I should be asking you that question.

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

#38
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.

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

#39
post #32
post #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)…

Why get those instead of modern Ryzens that are much faster at the same power levels?

Because I trust Intel and I don't see Mini-ITX motherboards with server grade quality for Ryzen... The only AMD I have ever had was a Thinkpad X100e and that convinced me to never buy anything AMD again. That said, X86 and ARM are peaking together so it does not matter what you buy, the M1 might save you some electricity but at peak performance below what a Xeon can deliver. For parallelism on the same atomic memory more than 4 cores will invalidate too much cache. And if you have a embarrassingly parallelizable problem you might as well use Raspberry 4.

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

#40
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 to mention the site and policies would de-evolve into reddit with admins
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