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Years ago I ran a side project that went viral. It grew to 60k visitors a day and my monthly cloud expenses were around $1,500. I cannot fathom a scenario where

Years ago I ran a side project that went viral. It grew to 60k visitors a day and my monthly cloud expenses were around $1,500. I cannot fathom a scenario where you get a surprise $100k bill from a viral hit. Anytime my project went down due to scaling, it was painful. You don’t get many chances at going viral.

jon-wood 7y ago
I’ve seen surprise bills not far off that, not from a viral hit, but from bugs in the firmware for connected devices which suddenly switched them from taking 1 action/10 minutes to 1 action/3 seconds. Needless to say firmware QA has become much more focused since that incident.
matsz 7y ago
You're right. I've went with the $100k assumption from the other comment.
franciscop 7y ago
60k is on the low-end of visits only from HN where I've normally seen 100k+. I saw around 60k once of 4-5 of my projects hitting the front-page. Also I know I make mistakes, both at coding and at setting things up, which can easily trash things around and make a 10x-100x multiplier for the cost. The risk is small, but the consequences are horrible so I prefer to avoid this risk. Edit: also note that even a $10k would be horrifying to spend in most personal projects, and $1500 is more than what most programmers are saving monthly in most of the world.
- user5994461 7y ago
  That depends a lot on the article and the views from reports on reddit/twitter/facebook/linkedin. 100k is rather toward the top of the curve. Here I've published stats on my few posts that reached first page on HN. https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-page-how-much-traffic-do-you-get/ https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...
benhurmarcel 7y ago
$1500/month is a massive cost for a side project, I'd rather have it go offline by far.
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  Side project turned business. It’d paid for itself and more.
reilly3000 7y ago
What was that cost for? 60k visitors is less than 1 req/sec, something a terribly small server should be able to handle with relative ease. We’re there a lot of static assets not served by a CDN or cache?
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  It was a SaaS. Required heavy database and memory work. But it supports my point that a surprise $100k is a far fetched concern.
skydv2 7y ago
I was getting $3-5k bills from Azure and AWS several times without being viral just because I enabled some wrong features. Luckily they refunded them. I don't want that crap anymore. We also tried to run on AWS EC2 for a while and it was costing us 10 times more than a dedicated server that we got later on. Ridiculous. Now I have a backup server on Azure just because they give me $50 credits and it's a basic VM with a 1Tb slow disk attracted and they manage to charge me $70 for this, when I can buy a box at https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml for 5-7 EUR. I think cloud is for idiots

jon-wood 7y ago

I’ve seen surprise bills not far off that, not from a viral hit, but from bugs in the firmware for connected devices which suddenly switched them from taking 1 action/10 minutes to 1 action/3 seconds. Needless to say firmware QA has become much more focused since that incident.

matsz 7y ago

You're right. I've went with the $100k assumption from the other comment.

franciscop 7y ago

60k is on the low-end of visits only from HN where I've normally seen 100k+. I saw around 60k once of 4-5 of my projects hitting the front-page. Also I know I make mistakes, both at coding and at setting things up, which can easily trash things around and make a 10x-100x multiplier for the cost. The risk is small, but the consequences are horrible so I prefer to avoid this risk. Edit: also note that even a $10k would be horrifying to spend in most personal projects, and $1500 is more than what most programmers are saving monthly in most of the world.

user5994461 7y ago
That depends a lot on the article and the views from reports on reddit/twitter/facebook/linkedin. 100k is rather toward the top of the curve. Here I've published stats on my few posts that reached first page on HN. https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-page-how-much-traffic-do-you-get/ https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...

benhurmarcel 7y ago

$1500/month is a massive cost for a side project, I'd rather have it go offline by far.

abootstrapper 7y ago
Side project turned business. It’d paid for itself and more.

reilly3000 7y ago

What was that cost for? 60k visitors is less than 1 req/sec, something a terribly small server should be able to handle with relative ease. We’re there a lot of static assets not served by a CDN or cache?

abootstrapper 7y ago
It was a SaaS. Required heavy database and memory work. But it supports my point that a surprise $100k is a far fetched concern.

skydv2 7y ago

I was getting $3-5k bills from Azure and AWS several times without being viral just because I enabled some wrong features. Luckily they refunded them. I don't want that crap anymore. We also tried to run on AWS EC2 for a while and it was costing us 10 times more than a dedicated server that we got later on. Ridiculous. Now I have a backup server on Azure just because they give me $50 credits and it's a basic VM with a 1Tb slow disk attracted and they manage to charge me $70 for this, when I can buy a box at https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml for 5-7 EUR. I think cloud is for idiots