Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?

I had a small website - a content aggregation - on which I put Google AdWords on. This was about 5 years ago and it's still going. It generates anywhere between 50-100 per month. Not much, but has been enough to support all of my other side projects.

Do you really need to start with $300/month fee? Can you start small(er)?

1. Heroku is expensive. Odds are you can get the exact same virtual/hardware specs with a cheap VPS from Digital Ocean or Linode or any of various other providers. It'll require a tiny bit more setup and configuration on your part, but it'll save you money. You could also consider shopping around lowendbox.com and lowendtalk.com to find the best current deals.

2. Optimize your application so that you won't need to scale via upgrading or adding new hardware for a long time. Be mindful of your database queries, cache things in the application itself, and use a caching web server like nginx as well. Only upgrade or scale to multiple servers if you've optimized everything as best you could at all the software layers and yet you're still experiencing more traffic load than you can deal with.

I've run medium-traffic sites and applications off of $5 and $10/month VPSs by following those 2 steps, with consistently good and stable performance and latency. My guess is that if you order a cheap VPS from the start and do everything else right, you'll find that it'll scale just fine for years and you won't ever need to leave it.

3. Have a donation banner and if it fits okay with your application, place ads.

Have you considered VPS? There are quite a lot of hosts these days that are reasonably priced - Digital Ocean and Linode come to mind first. Initial setup is usually all about trying new things and testing and starting small may be more cost-effective at least in the short term.

Depending on how efficiently you create the site and its functionality, you may be able to get away with minimal resources.

Edit: Ah, meowface beat me to it! :-)

$300 per month? You can finance and colocate big server for that price, as one of my customers does. $300 could also be used to rent 5-10 real servers in different countries, to run your own cloud with GeoIP and Linux containers. An other customer is running a shoutcast cluster of 6 hosts, two in US, 1 in Canada, two in Europe, and one in Korea for half that price. AWS traffic for such a shoutcast cluster would be several thousand $ per week.

Drop the stupid cloud. It costs to much. Rewrite your site to use only free software. Get a cheap Xen site. E.g. my own small server cost only €4 per month, offering 100mbit flat. Unfortunate my provider does no longer offer this contract, but there are other affordable hosts. Just take care, that you do not sign at a Virtuozzo/OpenVZ, or some cookie cutter provider who cripples performance like rackspace.

If unsure what Xen provider is good, get a real iron at Hetzner spot market for about €20-25, install a minimal Debian on with Linux containers, and run your site within a container. A real iron will likely provide more processing power then your site needs. So you can cross finance the host, by running applications you wrote for customer.

And always unbundle DNS contract from hosting contract, so you can switch fast, in case your hosting provider sucks.

- Look for a cheaper host for your MVP. Worry about scaling later. OpenShift has free options.

- Ads

- Referral programs (Amazon, eBay)

- Paid support, rather than extra features

- Collect statistics/analytics, sell them to other companies (a la bit.ly)

- Superficial upgrades, like a little badge against their username to show they're a gold/donating member