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TekMoi is right. I have an Alexa top 6k site which is vastly more complicated (media hosting, load balancing, multiple VMs, DDOS protection, transactional emai
by maxk42 6y ago
TekMoi is right. I have an Alexa top 6k site which is vastly more complicated (media hosting, load balancing, multiple VMs, DDOS protection, transactional emails, automated backups) which costs $200 / month on AWS.
The fact that this person is spending nearly as much to support 50k users a day as I do to support more than 4 million cannot be hand-waived away by "people are so free to judge other's[sic] situations". The matter is worsened by the fact that the application is so simple that it doesn't even support user accounts. There is room for discussion here about efficiency in application architecture. More importantly, an article billing itself as "Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users" is silly because there is no way this is representative of anything. I'm afraid new hackers will be scared by the high costs listed here and be discouraged in their own efforts.
- cinquemb 6y agoSimilar situation (sub $1k/month) to the setup im doing for a start up in indonesia (top 7k in alexa, top 150 in indonesia), except we have to pay extra for media because we need to process the logs (long tail pdf/data/docx hits, and we need to control the dns and how other domains route to use so we cant use cloudflare). And still plenty of room to cost optimize. Another consultant that came in and try to do this, made our costs go up by 10x per month… so i'm not surprised when I see stuff like this here… The knowledge of ones tools available at ones finger tips and the relative costs of such seem to make the difference for these things.
- ramraj07 6y agoIt's 50k MONTHLY users. It's just 3000 a day
- matt42 6y agoAnd 2.5 per minute
- runbyfruity 6y agoOr 0 per minute and 25,000 per hour for two days a month. Traffic can be bursty; don't assume that X/month means they're getting exactly X/30 per day..
- bartread 6y agoIt says in the article that the author gets 34k daily users, and 50k unique users/month. It would have been clearer if the author had talked about sessions (which are therefore > 1M/mo) for sure, but you're still making a very big (and invalid) assumption. EDIT: Please disregard the above. I need an eye test, or maybe just to put my glasses on! Daily users are 3.4k (3400), not 34k. My apologies, I take it all back!
- donatzsky 6y agoIt's 3.4k (3400) daily users. Not 34k (34000). Dont worry, I nearly missed the dot at first, as well :)
- senko 6y agoIf you support 4 million monthly visitors on a media site, and have multiple EC2 instances running, I'd love to see a cost breakdown structure, because in my (obviously incomplete and possibly naive) calculations, the bandwidth alone would cost more than $200/mo.
- maxk42 6y agoCloudFlare covers the media bandwidth costs for a mere $20 / month. The uploading and media conversion is the difficult and costly (in terms of CPU) portion.
- maxk42 6y agoAlso to be clear I'm talking about image uploads, not video. Still more complicated than this app.
- chmod775 6y ago>CloudFlare covers the media bandwidth costs for a mere $20 / month. Your media files must be extremely small. I'm guessing they're less than 20MB on average, because a) CF hasn't shown you the door yet b) they don't even cache anything bigger than half a gigabyte.
- pembrook 6y agoIf $171 month is discouraging, let me reassure them. There’s statistically a 95-99%+ chance you’ll never get to 55k monthly users with your app so don’t worry!
- zeku 6y agoLet's leave this kind of snark out of this community. It's comments like this that slippery slope a community from helpful to harmful. You see it each time a reddit community gets too large.
- teclordphrack2 6y agoI don't think its snark. Its, don't worry about optimization to soon.
- runbyfruity 6y agoNo, what's harmful is "oh, just spend $50,000 on managed Kubernetes to run a Django web app". That costs real time and real money and makes young engineers think that a phpBB forum is impossible with a five-digit AWS bill.
- fxtentacle 6y agoBoth you and TekMoi should probably value your own time higher. The cost savings are great, but once you spend 4 hours on configuring a database server, that'll probably be $200+ worth of your time and, thus, wipe out most of the savings.
- fhennig 6y agoFor OP it might be a good idea though, given that the infrastructure is their biggest cost and they have not revenue.
- salawat 6y agoBeing well versed in setting up your own database server bereft of cloud provider hand holding easily pays for initial time investment over time. I don't think most understand just how much a mastery of the basics is capable of generating in value when you're essentially vendor lock-in proof. There is so much blindness to voluntary hanging of one's arose out the window created by vendor overreliance.
- brendawalsh 6y agoYes, without clear leadership, it is easy for a dev team to flounder around in a cloud provider’s offerings.
- nix23 6y ago>$200+ worth of your time and Yeah, from your perspective, for others monthly savings of 10$ is allot, and not everyone earns 200$ for 4 hours of work.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoExcept that now you know how to configure a database server, and know how your database server is configured. So if you ever get a problem with the database in the future, you'll know how to solve it faster. Which will save you time and money in the future. And you're less likely to make mistakes like upgrading your server instance to try and solve a problem that can't be solved like that. And the more you do it, the cheaper and faster it gets. That knowledge and skill has value.
- bahularora 6y agoWhat are the right resources, you would suggest someone if he had to setup his servers properly. Will really appreciate if you can refer some books/videos/articles. Thanks.
- maxk42 6y agoIf you're talking about serving many requests cost-effectively, then really the problem is not the servers (except over-provisioning, which is rampant. Learn to use tools like AWS' auto-scaling system instead) - it's the code. If you understand the basics of algorithmic time complexity (that's your Big-O notation) and profiling your code then you're ahead of 98% of other developers in practice. I'm constantly amazed at how many developers think adding more libraries, newer frameworks, or more layers of tooling will magically speed up their code because "it's so fast". If you actually time things you'll find out doing it the "slow" way is frequently an order of magnitude faster.
- tomcam 6y agoWow! Congrats, and what is your site? Would love to read more about it.