Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 91 posts

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

#41

Post by mrighele »

xuki wrote: post #18
sph wrote: 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.

HN started as a project to experiment [1] with the Arc Language [2], so it doesn't surprise me that it used static files as a storage.

I wondering what is the stack these days though.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html [2] http://arclanguage.org

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

#42

Post by ejb999 »

shanebellone wrote: post #29
sph wrote: 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…

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.

Never underestimate the tendency of many SWE's to make things more complicated than they need to be.

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

#43

Post by wiseowise »

Tams80 wrote: post #25
sph wrote: 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…

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

Native mobile apps come to mind.

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

#44

Post by hackernewds »

andai wrote: post #23
xuki wrote: 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.

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.

They gave you false info

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171328

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

#45

Post by hackernewds »

DrBazza wrote: post #28
honest-teorema wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The actual ratings matter less than the relative percentile. that being said, Amazon ratings (or most other similarly dependent site's) are not a simple straight average.

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

#46

Post by [deleted] »

bullen wrote: 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)…

[deleted]

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

#47

Post by pifm_guy »

sph wrote: post #13
nabaraz wrote: 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…

Buuut... The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable.

If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn't work, and the business opportunity would be lost.

However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business.

That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

pedrocr wrote: post #32
bullen wrote: 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?

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by xuki »

neysofu wrote: post #31
xuki wrote: 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?

In my opinion, yes. It's simple to run, simple to back up, simple to migrate to a new server, upgrade path is straightforward (find the fastest single core CPU).

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

#50

Post by mritchie712 »

raverbashing wrote: post #6
Havoc wrote: post #2

Last dang talked about hardware it was on a pretty modest xeon so probably not all that much https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 Unsure if anything has changed since

(Edit: probably not) I think they also are behind Cloudflare and they use Algolia for search So not everything is running there

> Algolia

Are you referring to https://hn.algolia.com/?

pretty sure Algolia runs that for free (for marketing)

Post reply on HN