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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?

#51

Post by skion »

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…

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

With Hetzner that is indeed a necessity. They sell cheap iron, but don't expect any support from them and be prepared to move out quickly.

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

#52

Post by mattgibson »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #26
xur17 wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

If you enable the free New Relic add on and turn on availability checking, then the pings it sends every 60 seconds keep the dynos from ever being shut down.

Also, if you're using Rails, switching to Unicorn as the server allows 3-5 concurrent requests, so you can get quite a bit out of the one free dyno if you don't use the standard config.

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

#53

Post by hackerboos »

skion wrote: post #51
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…

> And always unbundle DNS contract from hosting contract, so you can switch fast, in case your hosting provider sucks. With Hetzner that is indeed a necessity. They sell cheap iron, but don't expect any support from them and be prepared to move out quickly.

Hetzner null route you in the event of a DDoS.

Better using OVH.

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

#54

Post by staticelf »

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.

The only issue with AWS is that it is an American company. If you are an EU citizen as me and worry about data security, I would not trust an American company.

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

#55

Post by meowface »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #33
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 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…

I don't know, I really don't agree. I've never had a sysadmin job but I never found any problems with any of these things. All it takes is basic *nix knowledge.

I do work in infosec though, so as for your pop quiz:

1. Disable root login and enable public key auth only (PasswordAuthentication no, PermitRootLogin no).

2. Run mysql_secure_installation

All of these things are easy to learn with a little Googling. "How do I secure X?" "How do I install/configure X?" Way, way easier to learn than learning how to program or start a business, at least.

It is not worth $300 or more per month just to outsource some sys admin tasks.

Not to mention I doubt Heroku is paying very close attention to your log files for you; it's probably easier for you to do that yourself on your own VPS (where you'll also have access to more logs in the first place). If you have a vulnerability in your application then no hosting/platform provider is going to notice it and fix it for you 9 times out of 10.

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

#56

Post by meowface »

aercolino wrote: post #41

It surprises me how many replies try to solve a side problem instead of what the OP asks for. The OP doesn't seem a computer illiterate, so no need to educate him on anything. IMO, he asks: "How does one scale a free web application, money-wise?". For example, "How did they scale Tumblr? [1]". That's a real mystery for me too. I know they were funded by some big names [2], but that kind of financial support here in E…

That's because in all likelihood OP was asking the completely wrong question. He has no application yet and no user base, so it's a waste of time to consider these kinds of things when you're trying to create your own application or business.

But of course, if you grow at such a scale where you're getting a lot of users despite investing little money into the product, odds are many venture capitalists and incubators will be interested in you.

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

#57

Post by opendais »

tempestn wrote: post #36
thaumaturgy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bl…

Do not use cPanel. Its security is disastrous.

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

#59

Post by heyalexej »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #45
SamuelKillin wrote: post #27

Surprised no one has mentioned App Engine. Their free tier will take you a long way.

Second that, if i'm not mistaking, there is a guy running his 4000 $ monthly biz running on the free tier... Can't remember which biz or where i saw it though. It was just API calls if i'm not mistaking and he wrote a post where he slimmed his app so it could fit in the free tier again. Anyone has an idea?

I think it was this guy. http://blog.initlabs.com/post/16359268329/how-i-reduced-goog... The project he wrote about seems to have changed direction though.

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

#60

Post by cheald »

hnha wrote: post #47
cheald wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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.)

maybe I have just been lucky but I am running a site on a dedicated Linux server for 3 years without any significant issues. There have been zero security issues. The only downtimes were caused by me. It requires maybe 2 hours of maintenance per month. It is also running on bleeding edge packages. Of course I invested some days into the initial setup but that is fun if it's your hobby.

If you need $300/mo worth of Heroku hosting, chances are good that you aren't doing something that's going to be terribly hands-off. Systems administration isn't hard, but it is involved - there's a lot of learning ramp-up that has to go into it.
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