Have you considered AdSense?
You need traffic in the hundreds of thousands of visitors to earn $300/month with AdSense.
You (probably) need traffic in the hundreds of thousands to justify the $300/month infrastructure spend.
Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
* minor correction to the above -- the first dyno is "free", so you only need to pay for one $35/month dyno to get 2 web dynos that don't get shut down
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#331. 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 is the approach I would take too, but I'm not sure I would recommend it.
The downside to Linode, Digital Ocean, et al is that you'll have to spend more of your time doing sysadmin work. If you're not already an experienced sysadmin, figuring out how to get the pieces playing nice with eachother can easily take up more than $300/month of your time.
And, once you're done with the setup, you're still not done: you have to stay on top of log files, watch for abuse, keep software up-to-date.
And and, if you've never done this before, you won't know what you don't know. (Pop quiz: you've never done sysadmin work before, what's the correct way to configure sshd? Bonus points: if you use MySQL, what's the first command you should run right after package installation, that nobody runs?)
I like sysadmin work, I consider it to be an important part of my software stack. But I'd be reluctant to tell anybody else that they should spend their time on it, too.
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#34Honestly, even for funded startups scale is generally the last thing one should worry about... it's the single best problem to have.
If you're doing it because you love it just do it, wikipedia exists on donations. Worst comes to worst you decide you can't afford hosting anymore, and you either limit traffic, or shut it down and paste a link to the code. It's not like you owe anyone anything for having provided them a free service for years.
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#35Try the cheapest server from Hetzner (http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40) with their fees even an expensive hobby turns out pretty affordable.
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#361. 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 is the approach I would take too, but I'm not sure I would recommend it. The downside to Linode, Digital Ocean, et al is that you'll have to spend more of your time doing sysadmin work. If you're not already an experienced sysadmin, figuring out how to get the pieces playing nice with eachother can easily take up more than $300/month of your time. And, once you're done with the setup, you're still not done: you…
You can get around some of these issues if you use a control panel like cpanel. (Although as you get further from the old-school LAMP stack the complexity starts to return.) Regardless, in the early stages, when you're just trying to determine whether there's a market for your product, there's a fairly low bar for system administration. As long as it works, it's probably good enough. Even security (beyond the most blatant things) can probably wait until you've got some revenue, since it's very unlikely you'll be subjected to a targeted attack before anyone has even heard of you.
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#37Hey, if I read that well the guy asks for advice on how he can get some money, not how he can spend less money. ;)
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#38If you host on AWS, I can give you two $100 credit codes to get started with.
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Even beyond medium popularity (depending on the type of site of course), you can move from a VPS to a dedicated server and handle quite a bit of traffic before you would need to use multiple boxes. (At least with some basic sysadmin skills, like using nginx instead of apache, or at least switching apache to the worker or event mpm and configuring it appropriately.)
The next step from there could be moving the database to a separate server. You can get quite a ways without even worrying about load balancing/proxying/mirroring/etc.
Re: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?
#40Have you considered using a [kimsufi](http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/). It's basically a cheap dedicated server. You can get a decent configuration for a less than
$10/month.
You will need to admin it yourself but this depends more on the size of your website, I don't think you should worry about it so early, especially given the fact that you're not sure if you website is actually going to take off.