Reddit: 2012 State of the Servers

I'm unfamiliar with hosting costs or really any costs running a site as popular as reddit. Anyone with experience in this area have a ballpark figure for how much it would cost per month to run this sort of setup?

Having no experience with database/website administration myself, I'm struck by just how little I'm able to translate the works and concepts in this post into actual, manual labor.

For each and every thing that Jason talked about...upgrading Cassandra, moving off EBS, embarking on self-heal and auto-scale projects...what took the reader a few seconds to read and cognise undoubtedly represented hours and hours of work on the part of the Reddit admins.

I guess it's just the nature of the human mind. I don't think I could ever fully appreciate the amount of work that goes into any project unless I've been through it myself (and even then, the brain is awesome at minimizing the memory of pain). So Reddit admins, if you're reading this, while I certainly can't fully appreciate the amount of labor and life-force you've dedicated to the site, I honestly do appreciate it, and I wish you guys nothing but success in the future!

It's interesting to see that they're sticking with Cassandra, and that they're having a much better experience with 0.8. I've been hearing so many fellow coders in SF hate on Cassandra that I had stopped considering it for projects. Has anybody worked with 0.8 or 1.0? Would you recommend Cassandra?

I got to work with Riak a lot while I was at DotCloud, but the speed issue was pretty frustrating (it can be painfully slow).

and also -- any idea how much they can bring id ad revenues?