I get about 30-40K unique sessions per month, so a little over 10% are paying users. We gave all accounts that signed up prior to going paid free lifetime accou

I get about 30-40K unique sessions per month, so a little over 10% are paying users. We gave all accounts that signed up prior to going paid free lifetime accounts, and many of them still use the site... so it's a weird mix. There's definitely stuff I can do to make AWS cheaper. Starting with just remembering to pre-pay for my instances ahead of time. One of my least favorite things to do is to log into the AWS console, so I try to do it as little as possible. The CPU intensive part is due to autosave. When a lot of people are writing concurrently (even on the order of hundreds), that was usually what would take down the site in the old days. The site is weird in the sense that there are 10x more writes than reads, and then doing all of the linguistic analysis, badge granting, stats generating cause spikes when they happen as well. I'm @buster on Twitter if you want to continue the discussion there.