Live data from Hacker News

We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

blog.polyhaven.com

201–210 of 426 posts

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#201
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare might not pay that on a per TB basis, but where are you getting 10 gige transit for under $1k??

Linode offers a 50 dCPU with 10Gbps out for $960. Or if you just need the bandwidth and don't need the CPU power, you can combine three $30 servers with 4Gbps each, and put them behind a $10 load balancer, for a total of 12Gbps out at $100/mo. https://www.linode.com/pricing/

That 10gbps comes with a 10TB traffic limit. The other poster was talking about a dedicated port with no limits.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#202
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They make a point to say that low-latency, global CDN is a priority for them Which, franky, is dumb. File downloads depend on throughput, not time to first byte like a small javascript file. Once bits start flowing it doesn't matter if they travel half way around the globe. It is like saying you are trying to optimize an ocean cargo ship for acceleration time.

> Which, franky, is dumb. File downloads depend on throughput, not time to first byte like a small javascript file. Once bits start flowing it doesn't matter if they travel half way around the globe. Round-trip latency has a significant impact on TCP throughput. It's not just about time to first byte. They're also not a static file serving website. If they were just serving static files and they didn't care about lat…

> Round-trip latency has a significant impact on TCP throughput. It's not just about time to first byte.

I've built three CDNs in my career, one at the Tbps scale. Latency only has two factors in throughput: time to scale window size, and retransmits. Modern TCP stacks handle the prior just fine, and the latter is only an issue with packet loss. You can also turn on HTTP/3 and remove your reliance on TCP entirely.

> I don't understand why you continue to ignore the fact that this for running a high-traffic, global, dynamic website, not just a static file server.

Because I actually looked at the site and read the article. The vast majority of the site is large static files. The frontend is a static JavaScript app that calls an API server. That API server is running on a $5/mo VM.

My offer still stands if you'd like a tour of a datacenter and see the sausage being made at scale. I'll throw in lunch and answer all your scalability questions if you like. But this thread is growing quite long and veering off topic.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wholesale IP transit prices are anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per Mbps depending on volume. 10 cents is far from the lower end for high quality IP transit. Cloudflare doesn't pay anywhere near $14.70/mo for 80 TB/mo. Even I spend much less than that on 80 TB in a month. On top of that, peering makes it even cheaper for Cloudflare, as you said. Cloudflare is very likely using peering for much more than 40 % of…

Cloudflare might not pay that on a per TB basis, but where are you getting 10 gige transit for under $1k??

Plenty of providers, depending on how many 10G/40G links you're willing to buy, check out https://blog.telegeography.com/global-ip-transit-prices-decl... to see how much prices have gone down.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point, it's "pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular". There is a generous free tier, and for years I have paid nothing to Cloudflare, but I serve 2GB total every month to visitors, YMMV.

No I didn’t miss the point, $20 is weeks worth of meal in majority of countries. People from those countries run successful blogs without paying a penny to cloudlfare. I serve much more than 2GB per month without all that on a dynamic site. Paying cloudlfare for that is like putting a tarp over a dumpster fire to quickly hide it. I would rather think why my static site fails like shit when it doesn’t even need server…

Then let your site fail, it's your choice.

For the rest of us who would rather not let our site fail, a quick one time $20 tarp over dumpster to handle the traffic in the meantime is good.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#206

I was running www.Photopea.com with 10M page views a month for $40 a year. Now, I upgraded to $60 a month. I never used any CDN.

Man i tried photopea the other day and it runs faster than my old photoshop. You need to slow it down :)

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#208

I tried looking, and I find it very irritating that in that whole web page, there is not one single link in the menu/footer/sidebar to polyhaven.com home page so I can click and discover what it actually is. Not one. This occurs on many company blogs as well operating under a subdomain like blog.whatever.com To be clear, this is a very tangential and irrelevant nitpick and I understand it does not contribute to the c…

Yes! - the same goes with support sites on different domains (support.whatever.com or whatever.zendesk.com etc) that appear in google results and don't have a link to the company.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#209
post #207

I handle ~150TB and 26M page views for ~$500 by simply renting a few dedicated servers at hetzner. And if I didn't need quite a lot of processing power (more than average website), it would be much lower. I only need so many servers for the CPU power, not traffic.

This! Hetzner root servers, there is nothing else I know on the market that comes close in price/power ratio when you use the "Serverbörse". I run multiple low traffic websites, databases and a heavy traffic elk instance + my complete homelab in proxmox / docker for 48€ a month and there is even room for more. Highly recommended!

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#210
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was running www.Photopea.com with 10M page views a month for $40 a year. > Now, I upgraded to $60 a month. I never used any CDN. Why not go back to the $40/month plan and spend $20/month on Cloudflare Pro? I was able to load photopea.com in about 5000ms, uncached. That's not terrible, but it was slow enough that I wondered for a few seconds if the site was broken. A CDN would cut that load time massively, and it…

Honest question: Why is everyone pushing CentralizedFlare pro so hard in this thread?

Because many competitors have taken an "Enterprise focused" approach. The choice of CDNs for more than media hosting and without $$$ commitment is quite small.
Post reply on HN