Running costs for running a web app • Hacker News Board

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#11

Post by vemv » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

AshleysBrain wrote: post #9

Cloud services can work out super expensive for a startup. To get going often all you need is one server that runs both the database and web server, which you can rent cheaply from any number of hosting companies out there. Sure you have to manage it yourself and it won't scale right off the bat, but sometimes that's fine. This is how we ran Scirra for a long time. Eventually you need to scale up, but that's a nice p…

Dividing your architecture into separate components is not only needed for operating at scale (the "nice" problem to have), but for having high availability (or even decent performance) at all.

Depending on one's business, HA/performance may not matter that much, but personally my startup is having a 'proper' design from day 1 - downtime is not acceptable for my business model.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#12

Post by lihorne » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

How do you only pay $80 for Slack a year? Their base price is $6.67 / user / month on an annual plan, so $80 gets you 1 user on Slack. Huh?

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#13

Post by superuser2 » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

AshleysBrain wrote: post #9

Cloud services can work out super expensive for a startup. To get going often all you need is one server that runs both the database and web server, which you can rent cheaply from any number of hosting companies out there. Sure you have to manage it yourself and it won't scale right off the bat, but sometimes that's fine. This is how we ran Scirra for a long time. Eventually you need to scale up, but that's a nice p…

If people depend on you for anything, you should probably have the ability to survive that one server going down.

Fortunately database warm standbys are WAY easier than true multi-master.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#14

Post by destroytoday » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

jggonz wrote: post #6

This seems ok given that the startup has generated approximately $60,000 in stripe revenue. I would try to reduce costs in those Heroku workers... $175/month seems steep.

Hi! I run Cushion. Moving off Heroku is definitely high on my to-do list. So far, since I'm a solo dev, I've taken the mindset of paying for convenience services that would allow me to spend more time working on the app. Now, I'm getting into the phase where I can start reducing these costs and transition to a system that doesn’t induce fear when I need to add another server. Right now, I have two web workers and two background job workers. The one background job handles integrations with other services, so I wanted to keep that separate from other jobs, like delayed emails, downloading backups, etc.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#15

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #10

jtchang wrote: post #4

Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.

Heroku is enornmously featuresome and convenient. Simply not having to think about how to stage, locate and run an app saves a lot of visible and hidden engineering time. Source: I work for a company which donates engineering time to what is, in some respects, a Heroku competitor (Cloud Foundry).

[deleted]

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#16

Post by destroytoday » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

lihorne wrote: post #12

How do you only pay $80 for Slack a year? Their base price is $6.67 / user / month on an annual plan, so $80 gets you 1 user on Slack. Huh?

I'm a solo dev. :) I use Slack as a notification center for all of my services.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#17

Post by seibelj » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

For all of you dreamers with side projects (like me): red hat open shift has a free tier with free ssl

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#18

Post by vemv » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

lcnmrn wrote: post #7

It costs $5/month to run Sublevel using DigitalOcean plus 21$/year for domain and SSL certificate.

One sure can have a DO droplet for a minimal rate, but unlike Heroku/AWS, they don't offer anything oriented to high availabilty, resilience, auto-scaling, performance (via workers), etc.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#19

Post by destroytoday » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

crabasa wrote: post #5

spoiledtechie wrote: post #2

This is a lot of money. I am running my startup for less than $250.00 a month. This is all server costs. Without a doubt, this cost has increased over time, but in the beginning of the startup, it was just $20 or $30 a month. Ive built and home grown all of these products or at least what I needed in house. Shameless plug: https://rdnation.com and https://snation.com

Unless you're paying less for the same line items, it's not really useful to say that you're running leaner. You might simply be using fewer tools.

I appreciate this.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#20

Post by Beltiras » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

I can slash about 4000 of those dollars down to 600 by renting hardware to run those services on. Makes you responsible for your setup but if you are bootstrapping, you can find better first year uses for 3400 dollars I'm sure.