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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

#91

Post by jeffmould »

TheCowboy wrote: post #76
jeffmould wrote: post #32

I always find breakdowns like this interesting. Just to get a feel for what others are using, their reasoning, and to generalize what others are spending monthly/annually. With more breakdowns like this from more companies, I think it provides a great understanding of costs. It also can give people a good baseline for understanding what costs are at certain levels of users and with certain functionality. While I unde…

I agree and would add that it's easy to look at their spend and think that's a waste, but I think with many endeavors, an individual's time is usually the scarcest resource. Web services expenses aren't even close to their cost of adding an additional employee to solve these problems in-house. Learning to automate something a more seasoned *NIX veteran could do in an hour is not always a predictable time expense, and…

That's a good point about individual's time being a resource. There are many things I am good at and there are many things I am not so good at. I would gladly pay a premium to a service to have them handle the things I am not good at, especially when just in the startup phase. So while one person may think that saving a buck here is an option, for me that buck may be the difference between being able to continue business, having to hire someone internally, or not having a business at all.

That's another good point about researching services can turn into a black hole. It is almost like the question of what framework/language should I use to build my startup.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#92

Post by hackerboos »

funkyy wrote: post #74
jtchang wrote: post #4

Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.

The bill looks huge. You can get SSL for like $8/year from reseller for one of the Symantec ones. I think that starting startup can cut a lot of corners by using open source resources and cheap cloud servers like DO.

You can get SSL for free: https://letsencrypt.org/

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#93

Post by minouye »

These "Heroku is too expensive" comments all look at absolute costs and not relative costs. They are paying roughly $200 a month to Heroku. If you do some rough calculations to figure out revenue (use Stripe fees and make assumptions about yearly/monthly plan breakdown) you can reasonably estimate about $3,000 in monthly billings. The incremental savings couldn't possibly outweigh the time costs of switching to another provider.

If using Digital Ocean allows them to move faster, then sure that makes more sense. But doubt that's true in this case.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#95

Post by jasoon »

misiti3780 wrote: post #57

This is the first time I have ever heard of Papertrail. I really hate loggly and am looking for a better option - can anyone shed any light on if this is a good option ? Which log aggregation services is everyone using ?

We got frustrated with the UI on Loggly and wound up moving to Logentries (https://logentries.com/).

I've not used Papertrail, so can't compare to them, but it's significantly easier to use than Loggly, they've been kind to us through the odd overage, and it does what we need it to do (Centralise a load of application logs and allow us to search over them and set alerts). The live tail feature is nice as well.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#96

Post by mbesto »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #78
_bpo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their total costs between Heroku and Redis infrastructure are less than $3000. I don't think you'd be able to hire a devops engineer for less than $30k, anywhere. It's surprising to me that people think they're spending a lot on infrastructure when they spend $800 on fonts, etc. When you drop the payment processor charges (which are per transaction) they're at $7k to run a site with a lot of functionality for a year.…

You don't get an engineer in my model: you usually share one with others. Someone who throws together this stuff all the time usually has premade images, scripts, checklists, etc that make it very efficient. You become one of their many customers. This might be a person or a firm. It's just one that focuses on great cost-benefit as differentiator. So, one $30-50k engineer gets split 5-10 ways on infrastructure. Most…

This doesn't take into account the following transactions:

- The time and money it takes to find said $30-50k engineer

- The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the engineer doesn't do the job correctly

- The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice.

- There is overhead time spent on managing such a resource (teleconferencing, IM's, etc)

- There is potential that the resource is unavailable and therefore a potential downtime that could cause your business loss

There's a reason Heroku exists and has been successful, and these are just a few of them.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#97

Post by hackerboos »

destroytoday wrote: post #26
daniel_levine wrote: post #3

What are the strikethroughs for? My assumption is thing you aren't paying for anymore, but wanted to double check since not all have replacements.

The strikethroughs are for services I once used, but have since cancelled because I either moved to another service or no longer needed that service anymore. Early on, I paid for Code Climate, but realized it was an expensive non-necessity at the time. For services like Mailchimp, I moved my newsletter to Intercom once the spiked cost of Mailchimp didn't make sense to keep.

There is also https://sendy.co/ which uses Amazon SES. It's a lot cheaper than mailchimp.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#98

Post by Negitivefrags »

vemv wrote: post #11
AshleysBrain wrote: post #9

Cloud services can work out super expensive for a startup. To get going often all you need is one server that runs both the database and web server, which you can rent cheaply from any number of hosting companies out there. Sure you have to manage it yourself and it won't scale right off the bat, but sometimes that's fine. This is how we ran Scirra for a long time. Eventually you need to scale up, but that's a nice p…

Dividing your architecture into separate components is not only needed for operating at scale (the "nice" problem to have), but for having high availability (or even decent performance) at all. Depending on one's business, HA/performance may not matter that much, but personally my startup is having a 'proper' design from day 1 - downtime is not acceptable for my business model.

Dividing your architecture into separate components will probably cause you more downtime and have much worse performance.

Less servers and components mean less things to break.

Grab a dedicated server and host your shit on it (have a DB replica because losing data sucks, but that is easy). You will be able to run like that for much longer than you probably suspect and the chance of downtime will be massively reduced.

Why? Because a single server has a very low chance of having anything going wrong.

Not only that, but there is a lot of overhead in performance when you split everything up into components. You will be surprised how many requests you can handle on a single inexpensive dedicated server when you haven't put too much effort into "architecture".

When you actually find yourself running out of headroom on that setup you will know much more about your application and it's requirements then you did at the start, so you will have a better idea of what to split out, and a better understanding of what parts of your app need more performance anyway.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#99

Post by funkyy »

hackerboos wrote: post #92
funkyy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bill looks huge. You can get SSL for like $8/year from reseller for one of the Symantec ones. I think that starting startup can cut a lot of corners by using open source resources and cheap cloud servers like DO.

You can get SSL for free: https://letsencrypt.org/

Yeah, I compared his paid to other paid. afaik not all companies are OK to use free SSL since it seems it is still a novelty.
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