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Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

keepthescore.co

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Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#101

Post by csande17 »

yread wrote: post #94
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me how people are so free to judge other's situations. It's great that your web app only costs $10/month but others may have web apps that are more computationally intensive e.g. video processing or ML inference etc or simply can't join everything they need at runtime. And it's great that you're willing to deny those 50k users a day access to your service when that cheap VPS inevitably falls over. Bu…

I have a web app that's struggling if there are more than 2 concurrent users per CPU core. It's displaying incompressible large resolution images with EDIT: not sure why I'm downvoted, I'm just presenting my use case. They are multigigabyte images encoded with custom wavelet compression that are cut into tiles (think google earth), each user needs 5-10 tiles every second

That's a lot of CPU usage per user! Is it doing some super-intensive process to generate the images on the fly?

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#102

Post by bigiain »

tristanperry wrote: post #54
FrozenSynapse wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to provide uninterrupted service to your clients you’ll have to spend some $. You want to have redundancy, machines hosted in different different locations, backup prod servers, monitoring, analysis tools. Even if it is for 1k monthly users, if you want reliability - it will increase the costs.

Two Hetzner CPX31 boxes sounds like it'd do just fine here too, providing the redundancy you mention for a fraction of the cost. Or get the boxes from different companies, for the same sort of overall price. Yes some of the other tools could arguably be worth paying for, but if the author's concern is that he's short on money and $140 is a lot, why didn't they KISS and only use what they need? Then scale as and when…

My guess is he's doing resume engineering.

And $140/month is pretty good value there probably... Even if that's just being able to point potential employers/recruiters at this blog post as evidence of experience building and running an HA website with more-advanced-than-free-Google-Analytics user behaviour tracking.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#103

Post by matt42 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #84
maxk42 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TekMoi is right. I have an Alexa top 6k site which is vastly more complicated (media hosting, load balancing, multiple VMs, DDOS protection, transactional emails, automated backups) which costs $200 / month on AWS. The fact that this person is spending nearly as much to support 50k users a day as I do to support more than 4 million cannot be hand-waived away by "people are so free to judge other's[sic] situations". T…

It's 50k MONTHLY users. It's just 3000 a day

And 2.5 per minute

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#104

Post by ing33k »

stevekemp wrote: post #92
achairapart wrote: post #25

I'm not familiar with Python as a web stack but to me it looks that the DO instances are a bit over-scaled for 55k monthly users. But what caught my eye was DNS Hosting: 5$/Month? Maybe it's a typo, shouldn't be more like 10$ per year to host a domain and its DNS? Anyway, thanks for sharing, very interesting.

I charge £1/zone/month for DNS-hosting, and while most of my clients only have a single zone there are people with 50+ DNS hosting can be cheap (free if you use cloudflare, etc), or very expensive. My prices give me a 50% margin over the raw AWS Route53 costs, but the appeal is that I store records under revision control and let you make changes using git: https://dns-api.com/

interesting .. is the price flat even If there are lookups in billions ?

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#105

Post by bigiain »

rapsey wrote: post #95
chillfox wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQLite Really is a bit of a hidden gem.

Not really hidden when it is one of the most widely deployed pieces of software on the planet.

Sure, but as an underlying dependency for iOS/Android, it's pretty well hidden from casual users...

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#107

Post by [deleted] »

yread wrote: post #94
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me how people are so free to judge other's situations. It's great that your web app only costs $10/month but others may have web apps that are more computationally intensive e.g. video processing or ML inference etc or simply can't join everything they need at runtime. And it's great that you're willing to deny those 50k users a day access to your service when that cheap VPS inevitably falls over. Bu…

I have a web app that's struggling if there are more than 2 concurrent users per CPU core. It's displaying incompressible large resolution images with EDIT: not sure why I'm downvoted, I'm just presenting my use case. They are multigigabyte images encoded with custom wavelet compression that are cut into tiles (think google earth), each user needs 5-10 tiles every second

[deleted]

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#108

Post by csunbird »

erikrothoff wrote: post #14
avolcano wrote: post #6

Nice writeup! Always appreciate transparency with these sorts of things, as someone who writes a lot of tiny personal projects and sometimes wonders how much I'd have to invest if they ever actually gained any traction. Congrats on having so many users, and good luck on monetization. For the server instances, I can't imagine 4 CPUs/8 gigs RAM is really needed 24/7, but can imagine it being needed in bursts, and I ass…

We run Metabase on a 2GB VM on DigitalOcean, costing $15/month, and using the DO's Postgres cheapest plan (still pretty expensive imo). It's a JVM app so using quite a bunch of memory, 60% atm. So total cost of Metabase is $30 per month. We could definitely just run Postgres on the same VM to get the cost down. As for web servers, you're totally right. At feeder.co we serve 25 requests / second (on Rails) per VM (we…

I also find $15/mo to be quite expensive as minimal configuration

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#109

Post by chillfox »

rapsey wrote: post #95
chillfox wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQLite Really is a bit of a hidden gem.

Not really hidden when it is one of the most widely deployed pieces of software on the planet.

I guess not in absolute terms, but it’s mostly overlooked for web apps.

Re: Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

#110

Post by bigiain »

TekMol wrote: post #62
bigiain wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but I think you're being a bit harsh. In my mind, choosing a dual redundant prod platform so you can do blue/green deployments is _totally_ unnecessary for a 55k MAU site generating no revenue. Same with cloud hosted metabase. You could run that on your own hardware - a spare laptop or probably even a raspberry pi for effectively nothing. On the other hand, a hobby project/side gig where you…

If we were on a site called "CV News" that teaches people how to get jobs in dull cooperations, I might agree with you. On the other hand, I would not frequent such a site. So we would never have had this discussion.

Yeah fair cop...
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