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

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

#11

Post by opendais »

meowface wrote: post #4

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 sc…

This. Very much this.

That said, I wouldn't trust lowendtalk.com too much if you want stability. If you are seriously contemplating a $300 budget, you can get away with $60 on Linode or Digital Ocean and have much, much better stability compared to some of the providers there. If stability isn't a big issue for you [e.g. 95% uptime is okay] then you can go with those providers.

That said, I wouldn't rely on a donationware model to bring in enough money unless it is less than $100. I know some sites that do function that way (mainly forums with strong communities) but generally they can't raise more than $100/mo reliably.

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

#14

Post by xur17 »

opendais wrote: post #11
meowface wrote: post #4

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 sc…

This. Very much this. That said, I wouldn't trust lowendtalk.com too much if you want stability. If you are seriously contemplating a $300 budget, you can get away with $60 on Linode or Digital Ocean and have much, much better stability compared to some of the providers there. If stability isn't a big issue for you [e.g. 95% uptime is okay] then you can go with those providers. That said, I wouldn't rely on a donatio…

I agree with the lowendtalk bit - I previously switched between 2 or 3 providers on lowendtalk, and I even had issues with one of the larger / more reputable ones on the site. Digital Ocean or Linode won't cost you that much more, and the stability will be worth it.

I've been running a pretty popular site off of a $5 / month digital ocean box with no issues for over a year now. Does Heroku have this large of a markup generally, or is the op just overconfiguring?

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

#15

Post by meowface »

xur17 wrote: post #14
opendais wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Very much this. That said, I wouldn't trust lowendtalk.com too much if you want stability. If you are seriously contemplating a $300 budget, you can get away with $60 on Linode or Digital Ocean and have much, much better stability compared to some of the providers there. If stability isn't a big issue for you [e.g. 95% uptime is okay] then you can go with those providers. That said, I wouldn't rely on a donatio…

I agree with the lowendtalk bit - I previously switched between 2 or 3 providers on lowendtalk, and I even had issues with one of the larger / more reputable ones on the site. Digital Ocean or Linode won't cost you that much more, and the stability will be worth it. I've been running a pretty popular site off of a $5 / month digital ocean box with no issues for over a year now. Does Heroku have this large of a markup…

As far as I can tell, all of Heroku's plans beyond their free tier have quite a lot of markup.

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

#16

Post by wise_young_man »

film42 wrote: post #12

Checkout AWS's Elastic Beanstalk. Full DevOps built in. I have an app setup to use a new cheap t2.micro server and skips the load balancer (but I can add one at any time). Performance is pretty good and best of all, it only runs me around $13/m.

We use AWS Elastic Beanstalk and couldn't be happier. We compared the performance of quite a few clouds and EB has incredible speeds over the competition even for paid plans. They just lowered our prices too from their old t1.micros to t2.micros about 50% and we have 4 EB applications so that really made a difference and we combine the CloudFront CDN to leverage even more caching where we can and have a scalable solution for very little cost. Data reliability is also a very important concern so we use AWS RDS with MySQL for our primary data store and Elasticache with Redis.

If AWS lowers the pricing of the entry level EC2 instances that Elastic Beanstalk uses a bit more, I plan on moving all my side projects as it just doesn't make any sense to manage any servers or pay $20/app when I get more flexibility with AWS (ssh to find logs, tight integration between AWS services, etc). The other thing I wish they had was the ability to use a EC2 instance for more than 1 application as we don't really need 4 separate apps, but it's just mostly for cost reasons as a bootstrapped startup.

One thing we don't use, but want to down the road is using AWS CloudSearch unfortunately and currently just use a file based search, but if they lower the entry level pricing (currently more than our entire AWS spend) or we can afford it we plan on using them to manage search.

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

#17

Post by boyter »

tdicola wrote: post #9

What about a kickstarter for $3000 or so? Enough money to run the site for 10 months and see if there is enough interest to keep it going. Not so much money that it's impossible to raise from small donations over the course of a month either.

Has that worked for any largeish webapps at all?

I'm especially curious as I would like to do something like this for searchcode. The costs aren't too high but since it has no revenue stream it would help keep things going even if my personal costs suddenly went up and something had to go.

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

#18

Post by ianamartin »

I use vpscheap.net for my side projects. They are very good. They have unmetered bandwidth plans that start as low as a couple bucks a month. I use the 10 dollar/month plan, and it's 1gig ram, unmetered on a 50mbit/s link, quad core, 100 GB ssd. You can do quite a lot with that.

Only thing I don't like is that I can't get a clean install. They seem to have one Ubuntu image, and it's not really minimal, so I have to do some cleaning when I start a new instance. Other than that, it's pretty great.

You could run a cluster of 30 of those for your Heroku budget, and I have no doubt that would be an insane amount of overkill. If you were absolutely sure you were going to get killed with traffic, I would spin up a small one of these as a load balancer and put it in front of two web/app servers and do one more for database. That's still just around 35 bucks a month. And you should be able to get that from donations.

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

#20

Post by cheald »

kephra wrote: post #8

$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 se…

> $300 per month? You can finance and colocate big server for that price

In the immortal words of Han Solo, "Yeah, but who's going to sysadmin it, kid? You?"

(I agree with you, however.)

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