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Cost is a very important factor... But you focused on the high cost end.. The cost of running a production server is something small startup businesses need to

Cost is a very important factor... But you focused on the high cost end.. The cost of running a production server is something small startup businesses need to budget for... And you don't want to run your production website on a 5-10/month shared server. If you design for the cloud/serverless, you can get your costs down to near-$0 for light usage... But yes, using things like lambda mean a possible bill shock if your traffic grows faster than your income can recover it.. but if you have an advertisement on the page, it probably will cover the execution cost if it's lean enough. In another example, I inherited a CICD pipeline that cost $300/month and could run 2 of our larger test suites simultaneously. I converted this to AWS Spot instances and now support thousands in parallel and I pay under $170/month ( https://ldoughty.com/2018/01/gitlab-multi-runner-w/docker-machine-and-spot-instances-for-much-cheaper-ci/cd/ https://ldoughty.com/2018/01/gitlab-multi-runner-w/docker-ma... )... But to your point about "what if" costs of this, yes, there's a limit on place for this setup so it can't go over 20 or so... And it is important to consider the impact of auto scaling with regards to the bill... For a small business, AWS effectively doesn't have a way for you to really stop "Bill attacks" or legitimate high traffic on API Gateway/Lambda short of you taking down your site. My recommendation is: ideally, don't expose something that costs you much too run unless you can recoup the cost from that action (paying customer, advertising).. your homepage should be static or cached in a CDN until you're ready for that large bill.

FpUser 7y ago
Dedicated servers are actually quite cheap. I pay $60/month to run one of my products that services thousands of paying customers across North America (High performance native TCP and UDP based game like servers) and the performance is quite predictable
- ldoughty 7y ago
  Indeed the servers can be cheap! The inherited configuration used a redhat image with support that added a premium cost on top of being a slightly beefier server to run a few dozen containers simultaneously for testing. With the configuration change we optimized the choices and dropped support. That said, it really wasn't much work to drop the 6pm-6am costs to effectively 0 unless a developer decided to work late (it automatically scales up)
user_50123890 7y ago
Please research opportunity cost. The total time you spent to optimize the service was probably in tens of hours. Multiply that by the amount of money you cost your employer per hour and you'll realize that your "optimization" actually resulted in a net loss.
- ldoughty 7y ago
  I'm fully aware of opportunity costs, the investment was made because an investment needed to be made regardless to stand up 2-3 more servers. Doing so would have raised costs to perhaps $400/month if we simply copied existing setups (plus 2-3 days of work, probably, since we had not revisited CICD in over a year) So by that, I've saved $5,000 in pure server costs. It probably cost me 10 extra man hours to do this way... But I also resolved a bug that was not terribly worth fixing before but took up 30 minutes of time every few months.. and improved the security by taking the servers off the public web.. however you want to quantify security improvements. I always look at opportunity costs and the automation cost/benefit! The article was researched and written on my own time for my own enjoyment (so this was actually "free" from a business perspective, but my responses factored it in as if I did it as paid work. Just clarifying in case someone wants to claim I'm publishing "work"

FpUser 7y ago

Dedicated servers are actually quite cheap. I pay $60/month to run one of my products that services thousands of paying customers across North America (High performance native TCP and UDP based game like servers) and the performance is quite predictable

ldoughty 7y ago
Indeed the servers can be cheap! The inherited configuration used a redhat image with support that added a premium cost on top of being a slightly beefier server to run a few dozen containers simultaneously for testing. With the configuration change we optimized the choices and dropped support. That said, it really wasn't much work to drop the 6pm-6am costs to effectively 0 unless a developer decided to work late (it automatically scales up)

user_50123890 7y ago

Please research opportunity cost. The total time you spent to optimize the service was probably in tens of hours. Multiply that by the amount of money you cost your employer per hour and you'll realize that your "optimization" actually resulted in a net loss.

ldoughty 7y ago
I'm fully aware of opportunity costs, the investment was made because an investment needed to be made regardless to stand up 2-3 more servers. Doing so would have raised costs to perhaps $400/month if we simply copied existing setups (plus 2-3 days of work, probably, since we had not revisited CICD in over a year) So by that, I've saved $5,000 in pure server costs. It probably cost me 10 extra man hours to do this way... But I also resolved a bug that was not terribly worth fixing before but took up 30 minutes of time every few months.. and improved the security by taking the servers off the public web.. however you want to quantify security improvements. I always look at opportunity costs and the automation cost/benefit! The article was researched and written on my own time for my own enjoyment (so this was actually "free" from a business perspective, but my responses factored it in as if I did it as paid work. Just clarifying in case someone wants to claim I'm publishing "work"