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If you are doing this by yourself with no system administration expertise then do yourself a huge favor and go with something like Heroku or EY. Note that EY w

by malyk 16y ago

If you are doing this by yourself with no system administration expertise then do yourself a huge favor and go with something like Heroku or EY. Note that EY will mean you have to do some sys-admin stuff yourself. I only have experience with Heroku, but the costs for a new service aren't going to be very high unless you have a lot of data. For $15 a month you get up to 20 gigs of database on a postgres database. 2 dynos which will handle a ton of users cost $36 a month. 1 worker will also cost $36 a month if it's running constantly. There are a handful of worker scalers out there to dynamically allocate a worker when it's needed and turn it off when it's not. So for starting up you're looking at 36+36+15= $87 a month (really less than that since your worker won't be running 24/7). Compare with the cheapest linode plan at $20 a month ($40 if you use 2 machines), plus all the time and hassle dealing with sys-admin stuff and the time it takes away from your product.

malyk 16y ago
Oh, I should add that you get a lot of great free add-ons that can help your business like New Relic RPM for performance monitoring, memcache, sendgrid, etc. with 1 click setup.
tsycho 16y ago
Thanks. If Heroku will cost me ~$100/month, I can definitely afford it. I just got scared by reading articles where Heroku costs reached 1000s when there was a usage spike.
- alnayyir 16y ago
  Don't let sensationalism and fear guide your judgment.
- malyk 16y ago
  The thing is you scale to meet demand. But unless you have a truly amazing product then you don't have to worry about that right away. Sure, you may scale up to 4 dynos to handle a techcrunch mention (or something like that), at $0.20 an hour. But you don't have to keep using that many dynos after the initial traffic spike. So you just scale them back after 2-6 hours and you pay an extra $1-2 a month for those spikes. Now, if you make it big and have to employ 25 dynos 24/7 then you are getting into the territory of needing your own infrastructure. But that is probably a long ways off and you'll be hiring people who know that stuff by then. Google around for some performance comparisons of heroku, but I think that I saw a something where you could handle 5000 or so concurrent users with acceptable response times (i.e. not hitting the backlog too deep errors from heroku), with just 2 dynos. Don't quote me on that, but it's what I remember. If you go to heroku's pricing page you can play with the number of dynos and workers all you want to see possible costs. One other thing to remember is that if you have periods with no traffic (say overnight at launch), then you can scale down to 1 dyno and your app will still be available but it won't cost you a thing. So really that $87 is the highest possible for a 2 dyno/1 worker deploy. You could save a lot of money by scaling back to the free 1 dyno during periods of inactivity.

by malyk 16y ago

malyk 16y ago

Oh, I should add that you get a lot of great free add-ons that can help your business like New Relic RPM for performance monitoring, memcache, sendgrid, etc. with 1 click setup.

tsycho 16y ago

Thanks. If Heroku will cost me ~$100/month, I can definitely afford it. I just got scared by reading articles where Heroku costs reached 1000s when there was a usage spike.

alnayyir 16y ago
Don't let sensationalism and fear guide your judgment.
malyk 16y ago
The thing is you scale to meet demand. But unless you have a truly amazing product then you don't have to worry about that right away. Sure, you may scale up to 4 dynos to handle a techcrunch mention (or something like that), at $0.20 an hour. But you don't have to keep using that many dynos after the initial traffic spike. So you just scale them back after 2-6 hours and you pay an extra $1-2 a month for those spikes. Now, if you make it big and have to employ 25 dynos 24/7 then you are getting into the territory of needing your own infrastructure. But that is probably a long ways off and you'll be hiring people who know that stuff by then. Google around for some performance comparisons of heroku, but I think that I saw a something where you could handle 5000 or so concurrent users with acceptable response times (i.e. not hitting the backlog too deep errors from heroku), with just 2 dynos. Don't quote me on that, but it's what I remember. If you go to heroku's pricing page you can play with the number of dynos and workers all you want to see possible costs. One other thing to remember is that if you have periods with no traffic (say overnight at launch), then you can scale down to 1 dyno and your app will still be available but it won't cost you a thing. So really that $87 is the highest possible for a 2 dyno/1 worker deploy. You could save a lot of money by scaling back to the free 1 dyno during periods of inactivity.