4 ms·
Some metrics: From the article: 60 servers 35% active users (defined as being active a given month) 2,335,676 total users 41,598 premium users 38972 users
by mixmax 17y ago
Some metrics:
From the article:
60 servers
35% active users (defined as being active a given month)
2,335,676 total users
41,598 premium users
38972 users per server
4 sysadmins
$68,641 - Total variable expenses (hardware + software + hosting + network + operations staff + support staff)
$145,000 - Total revenue from active premium users
From this we can deduce some interesting numbers:
free/paying ratio (all users) - 1,7%
free/paying ratio (active users) - 2.2%
revenue per user (all users) - $0,06
revenue per active premium user - $3,5
Variable expense per user - $0,29
38927 users per server
583919 users per sysadmin
I particularly find the $0,06 revenue per user interesting, since it gives a rough number to work with if you're doing a freemium website. Eg. if you need $10.000 in monthly revenue to break even you will need 166.666 users.
- jacquesm 17y agoI'm surprised at the low amount per active premium user, my numbers are much lower overall, but the amount per active user is almost 7 times as high. The free to paying ratio is (coincidentially?) almost exactly the same.
- ovi256 17y agoWell, in engineer's/scientist's terms, 7 times approaches the bar of significance, 10 times :)
- houseabsolute 17y agoI'm aware that some Europeans use commas to do their decimal separator, but I've never heard of anyone using the same symbol for both decimal separator and thousand-multiple separator. All the same, thanks for breaking out the numbers.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mixmax 17y agoI'm ashamed to say that it boils down to two factors: Laziness and copy/paste :-)
- z8000 17y agoI'm starting up my own tiny business and have been spending a great deal of time understanding how to optimize every part of the product infrastructure to minimize cost (to a reasonable level). $68K per month blows my mind if the number represents monthly expenses instead of yearly given the number of active users. I've an iPhone game with over 3MM active unique users and by my math I can host a multiplayer solution for less than $800/month. Granted, my service will not be sending giant PDFs, notes, voice memos, etc. but still... What am I missing? I am not being snarky. I need to learn. Also, is the 4 ops guys per 60 servers a non-shocking number? When I worked at Yahoo, the ratio of ops staff count to production server count was IMHO ridiculously high and I never understood why it was required. Sure, some redundancy and so on. Clearly I'm missing something though - what? I'm eager to correct my misunderstandings if I'm the one off base here. Can you recommend where I might find similar (perhaps more detailed) descriptions of production environments by other companies?
- ehsanul 17y agoI've got the same question. Anyone with an idea of why the monthly expenses would be so high, and why so many ops guys for just 60 servers? I don't want to be so cynical as to assume it's because of bad management or something; I must be missing something.
- pavs 17y agoJust speculating. Assuming they have a sysadmin available 24/7 (which they should) 4 employees is hardly too much. Its just enough. When your business is on the cloud with 60 servers, there should be at least one person available at all time, whether the server ever goes down or not.
- bigiain 17y ago"Also, is the 4 ops guys per 60 servers a non-shocking number?" 4 people is the bare minimum for realistic 24/7 support. Even if you just do "on call" support outside office hours, making sure someone (capable) is available every weekend and at o-dark-thirty every day is difficult with less than 4 people. (Says a guy who spend too many years as part of a 2 or 3 person sysadmin team...)