Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.polyhaven.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 426 posts

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

#411

Post by bsagdiyev »

youngtaff wrote: post #177
chx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right CF provides a lot more, it really must be noted that Hetzner SB servers start at 28 EUR and they _do_ come with unlimited bandwidth and 2 x 3TB disks. For 30 EUR you can get a E3-1245 with 2x4TB disk. Just noting.

Yeh, but that Hetzner server is only in one location so doesn’t reduce the RTT between your visitor’s and your server (particularly for visitors who are far away)

And for 99% of cases that doesn’t matter at all. People don’t like hearing it but it’s true.

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

#412

Post by collinmanderson »

innocenat wrote: post #302
anaganisk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My site never failed thats the thing without paying $20. And many developers can actually do it too. If you can’t serve decent traffic for a static site, I would rather fix the leaking tap once and for all than wasting money on a water tanker every time I am out of water.

And I am not saying you have to pay $20 every time. It's there to handle the traffic while you identify and fix the problem. It's your choice if you don't want redundancy in place if any incidents happened.

What does the $20 buy vs free plan? During a spike I was able to handle 30k pageviews per hour with Cloudflare free plan + $40 vps. Pretty much all pageviews were cached by Cloudflare and didn't hit my server. How does the $20 plan help?

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

#413

Post by collinmanderson »

xyexs wrote: post #408
otar wrote: post #166

First of all, kudos, I’m a junkie for such optimizations myself. It’s a pleasure that your systems are optimized well, you sleep well and you’re proud :) Two thoughts: 1) CloudFlare offers incredible service. What would need the team of netadmins/sysadmins can be handled via their UI easily. I use Argo in one project and yes, it is a very efficient tool. CloudFlare is becoming like AWS, knowing its tools is a skill.…

I'm new to this stuff, but what the source article describes is essentially just that it is cheaper to run a static website with a CDN than without - right? I'm mostly curious because they described the cloudflare service as a cache layer rather than a CDN.

> They described the cloudflare service as a cache layer rather than a CDN.

Not sure how most CDNs work, but for Cloudflare, content is not actively pushed to edge nodes, it’s only pulled to an edge when needed and then cached there usually for an hour or two.

The caching is still distributed, and all of the tcp+https roundtrips are done to a local data center which makes things faster.

> what the source article describes is essentially just that it is cheaper to run a static website with a CDN than without - right?

Right. The cost savings comes from caching done by the CDN, and public static content is super easy to cache.

The distributed part makes things faster, but doesn’t necessarily save money.

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

#414

Post by alphachloride »

cerved wrote: post #135
alphachloride wrote: post #124

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…

I had no problems navigating there. Every single link in the hamburger lead me to polyhaven.com

To the polyhaven.com home page? I don't think it did. They are all sub pages which adds another navigation step to see the root page, which is what I find irritating.

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

#415

Post by CRConrad »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #350
judofyr wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal and you don’t care about lost revenue, then it’s not really a valid comparison to the typical business website. I think you're severely underestimating how many businesses make a significant amount of money from their website, but doesn't actually have full-time developer available. An extended outage would cause significant revenue loss, but it's t…

> I think you're severely underestimating how many businesses make a significant amount of money from their website, but doesn't actually have full-time developer available. No, I’m well aware. But there’s a simple solution to this problem: Don’t try to run and maintain your own servers. Pay a little extra to use cloud hosting and let it be someone else’s problem. I take issue with these calls to setup and maintain y…

> No, I’m well aware.

No, apparently not.

> But there’s a simple solution to this problem: Don’t try to run and maintain your own servers. Pay a little extra to use cloud hosting and let it be someone else’s problem.

But that's only if it IS a "problem" in the first place. You have defined it as such, although Bitecode themselves said that for them, it simply isn't. (To paraphrase: "If the site is down, then it's down; so what? We'll fix it when we're in the office again.")

Just plain ignoring whether something is "a problem" or not is hardly being "well aware".

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

#416

Post by CRConrad »

nix23 wrote: post #235
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #226

Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. It cost less than $2K/Month. The cloud is crazy expensive. Private servers are beasts, and they are cheap. Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. You also don't have to maintain and debug a sy…

Thanks! Exactly that! I always tell that customers and their response is: -But google/facebook/amazon... -But uptime needs to be 99.999 -But everyone uses cloud Most businesses are not a trading-market, have less then 100 peoples (aka you are probably not another amazon), and no bonus using a cloud/kubernetes etc. But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;)

> But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;)

But no matter how logically convincing your arguments were, most of the time upper manglement just went on buying Oracle, right...?

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

#417

Post by CRConrad »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #87
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datace…

Don't you get tht same for free with GitLab Paged and last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets?

> last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets?

If not free then very cheap, as I understood TFA: Wasn't that why they have two separate domains and serve static assets from one of them, to be able to use the cheapest Cloudflare tier for that domain = those assets?

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

#418

Post by hansel_der »

SergeAx wrote: post #319
hansel_der wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the whole point of vm/container is to enable "servers as cattle"

Yes, but "Serverbörse" machines are very non-uniform, which may be bad for load balancing. See yourself: https://www.hetzner.com/sb

yes, it may be bad for indiscriminate/dumb load balancing. then again this only works in the firstplace if the work units represent a somewhat equivalent and small-ish workload.

once you place value on determinism (in regards to time spent on a task) you want a tightly specced distribution mechanism and/or a feedback loop to communicate busystate back to the LB.

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

#419

Post by hansel_der »

lelandfe wrote: post #375
hansel_der wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd also encourage you load your fonts late via JS can't tell if joke, so: there are already enough sites that display content for a split second and then some script runs (or fails?) and there is either nothing on screen or an error message. this is ridiculous - please stop!

Loading experience for this would be that a fallback font loads first and is later replaced. If something errors, it’s not replaced. What you’re describing has been thankfully avoidable for many years.

this failure mode has been avoidable like forever and i have only seen it become more widespred in the last decade.

be sure i blame ad-tech and analytics

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

#420

Post by XCSme »

nix23 wrote: post #235
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #226

Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. It cost less than $2K/Month. The cloud is crazy expensive. Private servers are beasts, and they are cheap. Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. You also don't have to maintain and debug a sy…

Thanks! Exactly that! I always tell that customers and their response is: -But google/facebook/amazon... -But uptime needs to be 99.999 -But everyone uses cloud Most businesses are not a trading-market, have less then 100 peoples (aka you are probably not another amazon), and no bonus using a cloud/kubernetes etc. But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;)

> uptime needs to be 99.999

Isn't AWS down like every two months for a few hours? That's far off the 99.999% mark. No one can guarantee 100% uptime and sometimes it's even better to have that under your control (eg. have a dedicated server and a backup one from different providers).

My point is that, if you want the highest possible uptime, you shouldn't rely on a single (cloud) provider.

Post reply on HN