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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?

#21

Post by lotyrin »

wise_young_man wrote: post #16
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 solu…

As far as multiple apps per VM, have you taken a look at OpsWorks? It seems to be aiming to be as automatic as Elastic Beanstalk, but significantly more flexible (at the expense of up-front configuration effort).

It certainly is unfortunate that CloudSearch doesn't scale down smaller, I had to skip it for the same reason.

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

#22

Post by nmjohn »

craigvn wrote: post #13

Sign up for BizSpark and you can get free hosting for 3 years in a cloud environment.

You get a $150 monthly credit for microsoft azure a month. While that is not anything to scoff at - a VM with 1 vCPU core & 1.75 GB ram is $45 / month.

Growing beyond $150 a month would be quite easy, even with a small user base, and at that point you are paying _a lot_ for what you are getting.

My point is just make you fully evaluate long term consequences of locking yourself into a closed source ecosystem with very expensive servers (Azure and AWS are both guilty here.)

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

#24

Post by vbrendel »

There is no way you can know exactly that two workers and two dynos are right. Just start off with Heroku. Maybe even pay for a worker or an extra dyno. Remember you can run multiple instances on a single dyno with eg. unicorn. Once your idea takes off you can deploy using the other posters' suggestions. By that time I thoroughly recommend Cloud 66. https://www.cloud66.com/

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

#26

Post by ProblemFactory »

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…

Heroku is expensive because of their markup, but more so because their platform forces everything to be separate managed, modular instances whose costs add up fast.

* Want a web server instance that doesn't get shut down between requests? Then get at least 2 web dynos at $35/month each.

* Want to run background jobs that are longer than 30 seconds? Then get a separate worker dyno at $35/month.

* Want a database with more than 10K (!) rows? That's at least $10/month.

* Want a memcache? That's $15+/month.

And so on. For a small to medium popularity site, all of these could be combined into one VPS on traditional cloud hosting. Heroku would make sense for a startup that has plenty of cash and limited developer resources (-> buy fully-managed-everything), and knows it will need to scale to tens or hundreds of servers to handle traffic very soon. But for most hobby webapps, a single VPS somewhere else will be 10x cheaper and good enough for a long, long while.

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

#29

Post by aaronbrethorst »

> But what happens if (a very large, hypothetical if) it does turn out to be more useful than I expected?

This is what you might call 'a good problem to have.' Either the site is sufficiently useful to people that you can charge them money (even if you don't want to...call it "donations" if it feels better), or it isn't.

The odds of you making donations viable is minimal. You're far more likely to make the idea breakeven or profitable by charging real money for it (preferably some amount of money greater than $3/month).

This topic has been worked over repeatedly over the past few years on HN. Try searching for past threads that involve cperciva, patio11, and tptacek for an idea.

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