Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users

Post by bizzleDawg » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

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…

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #134

dx034 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if they can choose between saving 10% on infrastructure or adding 5% ad revenue (through more optimizations), the additional revenue is worth more. Just running Facebook, Instagram & Co as a platform would probably be much cheaper than $8 per user.

Absolutely. Profligacy is often the rational course in a capitalist system.

Post by tomcam » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

maxk42 wrote: post #65

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…

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…

Post by mping » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

yread wrote: post #172

mping wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that your webapp is serving images in a blocking fashion, meaning every time a use requests an image it will fetch the image for the user AND block the http serving thread until the image is uploaded. Can you provide more context (eg: tech stack)?

What's blocking is number of http connections between browser and server. Most browsers only allow 6, each tile takes about 100ms so getting 10 in under second doesn't always happen.

Post by asadawadia » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #116

aikah wrote: post #8

Nice, we need more of these "real world expenses" posts on HN. I wonder how much it would cost to run the same app powered with Java. More? or Less?

We use Google cloud run for this. They bill per request and you can run whatever docker container you want. I currently have a small setup with two separate kotlin based server applications running there (one based on spring boot and one on ktor). We use firestore as a cheap datbase (billed per read & write). Both have a free tier. So it's costing us next to nothing currently because neither docker container is getti…