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Ask HN: What would it cost to build and maintain a Facebook clone?
If you take advertising out of the equation, there does not appear to be complex technology behind Facebook. That got me wondering what it might cost to replicate and maintain a Facebook full-stack clone.
- relaunched 9y agoComplexity comes with managing what they do at the size, scale and responsiveness that they operate.
- everdev 9y agoRunning a web agency, I got asked this a lot. "Can you add X feature? I don't want anything complicated, just like they have on Facebook." The trick is that behind a simple feature like adding friends there are all kinds of use cases: removing friends, blocking friends, removing banned friends, Unicode/ language support, optimizing/caching friend queries, etc. In Ruby on Rails, you can have a bare bones social network up by the end of the day and run it on Digital Ocean for $5/month. But when you scale to millions of users, you'll be paying millions in bandwidth, storage and staff. Basically, there's a reason why sure sites like FB need millions in VC cash. And the story if a kid in a basement making a hit site is only the first chapter.
- ccajas 9y agoAll you, and they, need to know is, "the devil is in the details". Knowing the solution can be simple, but the process complicated. Ironically, FB all started with a couple of college students coding PHP. A lot of web agency clients probably figure it is the same. I would have like to have been there during the time where FB needed to scale rapidly to accommodate for its rise in popularity. For me, those are the most interesting times to work for a company.
- thomasthomas 9y agoadd up all their expenses on all their 10k's and you have a baseline starting point.
- rajeshpant 9y agoIt would cost you more than what it costs facebook to run facebook. The initial cost barrier to run and scale something at that level would be more for a new company/startup than it costs facebook. Also, any new startup would have to spend a huge amount of money before they even know where to optimize costs. As per this article[0], Facebook has around $3 Billion in datacenter investments.
- aphextron 9y ago>If you take advertising out of the equation, there does not appear to be complex technology behind Facebook. You're gravely mistaken.