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Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

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Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#81

Post by sofixa »

shanebellone wrote: post #29
sph wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…

It's curious how "best practices" would cost ~10x and require 5 devops. HN is crazy simple. Even $500/m sounds a bit high imo.

Crazy simple and thus misses a few rather basic features - like proper scaling (the icons for upvote/downvote and buttons for actions are too big for mobile, and also too small on big screens), and some basic late 2000s AJAX to avoid page reloads for basic actions such as adding/deleting a comment.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#82

Post by sofixa »

bullen wrote: post #39
pedrocr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why get those instead of modern Ryzens that are much faster at the same power levels?

Because I trust Intel and I don't see Mini-ITX motherboards with server grade quality for Ryzen... The only AMD I have ever had was a Thinkpad X100e and that convinced me to never buy anything AMD again. That said, X86 and ARM are peaking together so it does not matter what you buy, the M1 might save you some electricity but at peak performance below what a Xeon can deliver. For parallelism on the same atomic memory…

Making decisions based on opinions that are 12 years old is stupid in any niche, let alone in tech where things change quickly. AMD have been the best bang for buck for what now, 5-6 years? Brand loyalty here doesn't make much sense.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#84

Post by bullen »

sofixa wrote: post #82
bullen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I trust Intel and I don't see Mini-ITX motherboards with server grade quality for Ryzen... The only AMD I have ever had was a Thinkpad X100e and that convinced me to never buy anything AMD again. That said, X86 and ARM are peaking together so it does not matter what you buy, the M1 might save you some electricity but at peak performance below what a Xeon can deliver. For parallelism on the same atomic memory…

Making decisions based on opinions that are 12 years old is stupid in any niche, let alone in tech where things change quickly. AMD have been the best bang for buck for what now, 5-6 years? Brand loyalty here doesn't make much sense.

I don't know where you have been for the last 10 years but NOTHING has improved, my Ivy Bridge CPU with DDR3 RAM has lower latency than anything released today.

SSDs peaked in 2011 with X-25E at 65nm and 100.000 writes per bit.

From C64 to today you have 1.000-10.000x per watt... if your Ryzen is 2x better than Intel it's irrelevant in that context.

The hard thing now is longevity, since the hardware does not improve.

It's over, time to start writing better software!

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#85

Post by bullen »

densh wrote: post #79
bullen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I trust Intel and I don't see Mini-ITX motherboards with server grade quality for Ryzen... The only AMD I have ever had was a Thinkpad X100e and that convinced me to never buy anything AMD again. That said, X86 and ARM are peaking together so it does not matter what you buy, the M1 might save you some electricity but at peak performance below what a Xeon can deliver. For parallelism on the same atomic memory…

In microATX form factor Asrock has had a number of AM4 motherboards with IPMI and ECC RAM available for a long time. For example: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X... AMD is now firmly ahead in performance/watt, and in peak performance on most server-side benchmarks (see phoronix). Xeon superiority is a thing of the past. The only area where Intel is competitive is in AVX512 workloads.

Micro-ATX is too big.

This is how you build a 75W server that lasts 100 years and can do AI too :D, just remove the GPU for no AI: http://move.rupy.se/file/xeon_1030.png

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#86

Post by therealdrag0 »

imiric wrote: post #68
pifm_guy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buuut... The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable. If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn't work, and the business opportunity would be lost. However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business. That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.

> If overnight, HN became the new Facebook Begone, Satan! > That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup. Realistically, how many companies reach the scale of FB? If successful, they'll reach a few thousand concurrent users, which can be serviced by the monolith model, and even scaled traditionally. HN is a testament of how well this model can work. Building an entire infrastructure arou…

FANG is hyperbole. There are a TON of companies between HN and FB that have scale or complexity that requires more than a single service to run.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#87

Post by therealdrag0 »

ejb999 wrote: post #42
shanebellone wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's curious how "best practices" would cost ~10x and require 5 devops. HN is crazy simple. Even $500/m sounds a bit high imo.

Never underestimate the tendency of many SWE's to make things more complicated than they need to be.

Never underestimate the ability for a company to chase customers which turns into feature requests which turns into complexity which turns into revenue which turns into profit and nice salaries.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#88

Post by MacsHeadroom »

ttyyzz wrote: post #10
halotrope wrote: post #3

I would be surprised if it was more than $100 per month

I think you might be off here by the order of ~10

Real cost is probably closer to $10/month, given HN is apparently hosted from an on-prem server built in 2012.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#89

Post by neysofu »

sph wrote: post #72
neysofu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that supposed to be a good thing?

Would it make your experience as a user better if the data was stored in a schema-less distributed database instead of saved to file? Would you browse it more often? If you had to pay for it, would you pay more money? Because at the end of the day, none of those decisions matter, and sometimes the crappy, inelegant solution is cheaper and more understandable to the ones running it for almost two decades.

Oh, I'm not debating the impact such a decision has on users, but rather on development experience and ops.

> schema-less distributed database instead of saved to file

I was actually going to suggest SQLite.

Re: Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

#90

Post by sh4rks »

dspillett wrote: post #77
sh4rks wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one find the best tools for the job? I want to build something that is performant and maintainable, but I also don't want an over-engineered mess.

Read what others are doing, especially if it seems everyone is doing something similar, but, and this is the vital part, apply critical thinking & specific knowledge of your use case . And keep an eye on new ideas that are less common, and keep in mind old ideas that are out of fashion, and apply said critical thinking to them also (or use them & lessons learned using them in the past to judge against the other/newer…

Thank you, this is good advice.
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