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Running costs for running a web app

cushionapp.com

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Re: Running costs for running a web app

#211

Post by campers »

_bpo wrote: post #77
thedevil wrote: post #71

Anyone here have any thoughts on AppEngine vs Heroku? I use AppEngine for my experimental projects because I can get a simple data model and some handlers running in minutes and a (supposedly automatically scalable) useful backend up in less than a day, and at very low cost. (Virtually free if I use an *.appspot.com domain). You do get lockin issues but don't you also get lockin from Heroku? Is there big advantages t…

You get lockin issues with any vendor - even server colocation :) AppEngine is a great tool for a great price. It scales smoothly with an affordable increase in pricing. Heroku is sort of famous for getting too expensive at large scale. Their advantages are their ecosystem (most of the additional services listed in the OP can be installed quickly, and you're still only billed by Heroku), and their UIs which tend to b…

Parse.com is similar to Heroku in that its simple to get started and has a free tier but gets real expensive once you go over that. I'm rebuilding my Parse back-end and going with Google app engine managed vms for a number of reasons.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#212

Post by imaginenore »

jarfil wrote: post #210
imaginenore wrote: post #205

And here I am, running 7 sites on my $15/year VPS box. Yup, just $1.25/month, and the sites generate a few hundred a month th. If I moved to Heroku or AWS, my profits would definitely suffer.

According to their Stripe data, they're making between $2560 and $4700 a month with around 200 users. If your VPS box could handle that... they might still have a better business model.

200 users is nothing. It's not like they are rendering 3D on the backend.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#213

Post by zwetan »

it's when I see that kind of costs that I wonder if people have completely forgotten about sysadmin and dedicated servers ?

hey we don't know how to do those cryptics admin stuff on the command-line let buy services instead and atomise our monthly costs ...

I don't even talk about tons of open source solutions that would reduce even more the costs.

OK I'm probably biased here

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#214

Post by ausjke »

pilif wrote: post #196
somberi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can get 15 free accounts in Zoho (10 de-facto + 5 extra), if you can refer another business. Both parties get 5 extra users. Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc.

> Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc. I don't know about Zoho, but in case of Google Apps, they allow you a configuration to route all mail through a host of yours which would allow you to create these aliases without having to pay for actual accounts. At lest that's what I'm doing at our place. All mail to our domain goes to our MX which does alias expansion and then forwards is to Google Apps (after making a ba…

I moved from google-apps to zoho, one reason is that google email is not available globally while zoho is, e.g. google-email is totally blocked for Chinese(employees)

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#215

Post by Garvey »

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

Just an FYI, on the snation.com site, WOT flags the page as Very Poor on Trustworthiness and Child Safety.

The details of the WOT report make it seem like it could be an outdated report of spam/malware.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#217

Post by smarx007 »

destroytoday wrote: post #123
brad0 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a one time cost. The others are monthly costs. Most likely they're paying for a redistributable licence which is much more expensive than other licences. For instance, take a look at this font I'm currently integrating into the app I'm working on: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/buy... If you want to put these on the web, you're p…

Correct—the font licenses were a one-time cost. Previously, I was using Typekit, but I hit an issue with the requests stalling for ~3 seconds. Apparently, Chrome has a threshold of not loading more than ~5 requests from a single external location at once, which resulted in the stall. I reached out to the font foundries and they were incredibly helpful in letting me try out the fonts for performance testing. When load…

Are you allowed to use these fonts in a native mobile app?

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#218

Post by pilif »

vacri wrote: post #203
pilif wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc. I don't know about Zoho, but in case of Google Apps, they allow you a configuration to route all mail through a host of yours which would allow you to create these aliases without having to pay for actual accounts. At lest that's what I'm doing at our place. All mail to our domain goes to our MX which does alias expansion and then forwards is to Google Apps (after making a ba…

Google Apps allows you to create groups for free, or you can alias individual mailboxes (if you're okay with thing@ going to just one person). No need to run through your own middlebox. You do need to make sure that external people can send to the given group, though.

Yeah. I know - but I also wanted the free backups with instant-imapd support for when Google decides that they want to cancel our account for $REASONS and we won't have anybody to call (to this day still my biggest worry with google apps)

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#219

Post by destroytoday »

smarx007 wrote: post #217
destroytoday wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct—the font licenses were a one-time cost. Previously, I was using Typekit, but I hit an issue with the requests stalling for ~3 seconds. Apparently, Chrome has a threshold of not loading more than ~5 requests from a single external location at once, which resulted in the stall. I reached out to the font foundries and they were incredibly helpful in letting me try out the fonts for performance testing. When load…

Are you allowed to use these fonts in a native mobile app?

Unfortunately, no—that's a different license, which is strangely much more expensive than a web license.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#220

Post by rbritton »

rimantas wrote: post #194
rbritton wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also StartSSL ( https://www.startssl.com ) for certificates too. You can get basic ones for free or pay a relatively cheap amount to get more a higher tier validation. I've been using them for years successfully, and when combined with SNI, I no longer need to pay for a multi-domain certificate.

StartSSL free certificates are for non-commercial use only. It is burried in the terms, but that is so.

I just checked and you're right. Their website is very misleading on the subject: "The StartCom Certification Authority, provides the StartSSL™ Free certificates instantly, without limitations". Correct me if I'm wrong, but "Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only." is the very definition of a limitation.

Thankfully it doesn't affect me currently -- I'm using class 2 certificates -- but I'll be doing more research come renewal time.

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